Re: Gnus maildir backend issues

[Sascha Wilde <wilde@sha-bang.de>]

prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) wrote:

> Sascha Wilde <wilde@sha-bang.de> wrote:
>> 1. the backend creates empty files in .nnmaildir/num for each mail seen
>>    and never deletes them.  This results in thousands and thousands of
>>    (empty) files
>
> Not quite.  There are thousands and thousands of links to a small
> number of empty files (often just one per maildir), so the amount of
> disk space used is very small.

I wasn't worrying about disc space, but a bit about inodes, but as they
are mainly links it turns out my concern wasn't justified.  :)

>>    I don't understand why these files are needed and I definitely
>>    consider it a bug, that they are never removed.
>
> They're used to keep track of article number assignments.  If you
> remove them, you may cause some data corruption.

Hu?  I removed the entire .nnmaildir sometimes and had no problems.
Even more, I wouldn't expect to encounter an problems as I would expect
the original maildir to be self contained.  Actually for most other MUAs
it is, isn't it?

> Is this causing any actual problems for you, or is it an aesthetic
> objection?

Well..  First of all I consider it problematic in general, to store meta
data forever.  Why would one need any information on mails deleted years
ago?  (You might call this "aesthetic".)

The actual problem is:  We are having a bunch of maildir folders on an
nfs volume and sometimes want to do operations like find-greps on all of
them.  In this case all the thousands of files significantly slow down
operations -- or excluding all the .nnmaildir directories makes entering
the commands more cumbersome.  Not a big issue, but annoying.

>>    It would be great to have an option, that says: only move mails to
>>    cur when the folders summary was displayed.
>
> I can see how that might be useful, but it would take a significant
> amount of work.

While it would be very helpful for our current use case (being two, soon
three admins working together on one shared maildir spam folder, me
using gnus and my coworker using mutt), I have to admit, that it
probably isn't worth much afford.

cheers
sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde : "Ist es nicht schon schlimm genug, dass ICH hier rumtrolle?"
             : (Henning Leise in d.o.c.)