Re: [Nmh-workers] What is MH ? (was: exciting new stuff for 2.0 (IMAP proposal))

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Mon, 09 Jan 2006 11:15:38 -0600
    From:        Chris Garrigues <address@hidden>
    Message-ID:  <address@hidden>


  | 1) If the MH community has nothing to do with the implementation,
  |    what's going to assure that the IMAP filesystem looks like something
  |    that MH can use easily.

Easily being the operative word there - if it were done, and messages turned
into files, then MH would be able to use it - if the directory structure
happens to look just like MH wants, that would be easier, if it doesn't,
it could still be handled, with a little more difficulty.

  | It seems unlikely to me that such a filesystem will be implemented
  | unless the MH community is involved.

Unless people who care about MH, and use it are involved, yes, that's
most probably completely true.   But it doesn't have to be the same group,
and almost certainly shouldn't be - it takes almost no knowledge of
e-mail formats to make something like this, so those people in the MH
community who are there to help make sure that the e-mail formats are
properly maintained, and parsed, wouldn't need to be involved.   On the
other hand, there are lots of file system details, that MH normally has
no knowledge of, nor any need to understand, and so a project like this
would need assistance from people who have nothing in particular to do with
MH I'd expect.   I'd also expect that the IMAP community (or some part of
it) would have an interest.

So, certainly I'd expect this to be something that many (or at least
several) of the people who participate on the MH list would get involved
with, I'd be horrified if the MH mailing list suddenly started talking
about VNODE operations, and how to implement the right ones for an IMAP
filesystem.

kre