Re: Rmail mbox support status ?

[Paul Michael Reilly <pmr@pajato.com>]

Xavier Maillard wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Can you explain how I should test and report what is working for me in 
> the rmail mbox branch for GNU emacs ?

The Rmail/mbox branch is dead for all intents and purposes.  Here's
the Readers Digest version of the story behind the story:

After checking out the Rmail/mbox branch I found that it did not
build.  I then decided that I did not want to work out of a branch
mostly because it is a pain in the butt for other developers to test
Rmail in a branch.  So I went for plan B: clone Rmail in the trunk
using a minimalist (and reversible) strategy.  I call this clone
Pmail.  When Pmail is stable for a few testers it will be recast as
Rmail and will replace the the current Rmail files.

While there are currently pmail*.el files in the trunk, the only
relevant (non-stale) one is pmail.el (which means Rmail/mbox summary
mode is known to be broken.)

The piece that needs to be tested heavily is message decoding and
display handling.  So if you have an opportunity to display text
messages that require decoding that would be very helpful.  All the
required code is in the one file pmail.el and all my changes needed to
test message decoding and display are committed to the trunk.

In my testing I set 'pmail-preserve-inbox so that I can alternate
between Rmail/babyl and Rmail/mbox.

> I thought I had to use pmail (in latest CVS) but I also read that you 
> were abandoning pmail for something else, am I right ?

What I abandoned was the code from the branch.  I essentially started
over when I found that the branch based code performed abysmally
compared to Rmail/babyl for very large mail files (~100MB).  This was
the proverbial straw.  Starting over eliminated many merge issues that
had accumulated while the branch code was getting no love.  So I
killed two birds with one stone, so to speak.

> I already converted a real huge BABYL file to mbox and get it captured 
> by pmail but now I am stuck since I can't use pmail summary.

I am currently working on the summary code.  I'll make an announcement
on the list when it is ready.

Thank you very much for helping out.  If you find issues with
Rmail/mbox please submit a bug and tag it for package "pmail".
Hopefully one of Chong or Stefan will make me the "pmail" package
maintainer if they have not already done so.

-pmr