Re: [Nmh-workers] Holes

[Bill Wohler]

Lyndon Nerenberg <address@hidden> wrote:

> > You know, unless I'm missing something, the holes in our messages
> > numbers could be considered a bug. I find it annoying to have to use
> > "folder -pack" occasionally. If we kept our folders packed, then we
> > could get rid of the folder -pack option.
> 
> The overhead of renumbering potentially every message file in a folder
> after every rmm is a potential performance killer.  Think 'rmm 1' in
> an NFS-mounted folder with 10K messages in it.  That's an absurd
> amount of traffic to throw at an NFS server on every message delete.

Right, but if we use unique, immutable message filenames, the message
numbers would just be a view onto that namespace and thus would incur
little IO overhead.

Given your rmm example, though, it seems that because MH exposes message
numbers in the UI, we might not be able to drop packf in any case. For
example, if we did collapse message sequences on the fly, if you ran
scan 1-5, show 1, and then rmm 1, a show 2 command would then show
message 3 from the previous scan, which wouldn't be good.

Oh well. Worth exploring.

-- 
Bill Wohler <address@hidden> aka <address@hidden>
http://www.newt.com/wohler/
GnuPG ID:610BD9AD