Re: From Gnus to mu4e

[Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 04:50:23PM -0700, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
> On 2015-08-28 01:34 +0200, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> 
> > > Because otherwise, you would have Gnus and offlineimap competing for
> > > access ?
> 
> > I do not think this is possible.  In fact AFAIK, any kind of race
> > condition in a maildir is not possible by design, as long as the
> > filesystem operations are atomic.
> 
> I think this applies to the original delivery, but not necessarily to
> subsequent manipulation of maildirs.
> 
> For example, the message flags are stored by appending them to the file
> name.  If two MUAs concurrently scan the maildir for messages, then try
> to set a flag on one message, a race is possible.
> 
> I observed wierdness when I tried to access my mail both by IMAP (the
> with Dovecot as the IMAP server) and directly reading the underlying
> maildirs with mutt.  That was part of the reason why I gave up on IMAP
> entirely, and instead read over ssh and mutt locally on the server.

No, it's not.  AFAIK on most (all?) *nix filesystems, basic operations
are atomic.  See for example this (outdated) list:

http://rcrowley.org/2010/01/06/things-unix-can-do-atomically.html

E.g., this breaks down when you talk about network mounts like NFS (not
sure about SSHFS), but it is a valid assumption as long as your storage
is local.

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.