Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:57:52 +0100
From: Michiel Buddingh' <michiel@michielbuddingh.net>
To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org, cworth@cworth.org
Message-ID: <4b095f80.oVC2da9Z18jqqm5n%michiel@michielbuddingh.net>
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Subject: Re: [notmuch] [PATCH] notmuch: Add Maildir directory name as tag
	name for messages
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Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> wrote:

> > A Maildir-aware notmuch could incorporate this to be far more
> > resistant to bulk mail moves done by other clients, by using
> > filename lookups to avoid accessing and parsing the mail
> > files themselves.

> I don't think opening a file to read out a message ID will ever be
> a bottleneck. But yes, we could take advantage of the unique name
> if we insisted that the storage have it.

I'm not so sure.  On traditional unix-like filesystems, every file 
access is another potential disk seek.  

People use a lot of different strategies for keeping their mail 
accessible and performant; you yourself, I gather, use non-semantic
directories mainly intended to keep the number of files per directory
low; others store their mail per month, or per year.

I might choose to move all my mail from 2008 from my INBOX to the 
folder Archive.2008; such moves may change the paths of thousands 
of messages at a time.

> Personally, I still regularly end up indexing stuff that's not 
> in proper maildir format, (like just manually copying a mail
> file "foo" down into a directory that I know isn't being delivered 
> to by any MDA but that I want notmuch to index.) Maybe that's just
> me, because I'm always bringing up little things for debugging, 
> etc. But it is convenient at least.

Oh true.  And it occurs to me that notmuch is a quite sensible 
companion tool to MH users (if they're still around in any numbers)

> Actually, I don't think that's true at all. Notmuch is definitely
> intended to become a lot more than it is right now. And if it's not
> making it easy for you to deal with mail the way you'd like to, then
> we definitely do want to look into expanding notmuch to be able to
> address that.

Thanks for your consideration; on the other hand, I do think that it
is a good idea not to make matters more complex than they need to be,
so I can certainly sympathise with the principles you've set for this
project.

regards,
Michiel Buddingh'