[Taking a private message back to the list with permission]

also sprach Ben Gamari <bgamari@gmail.com> [2010.02.18.1620 +1300]:
> This is a very good point. From what I've read about the database
> format, I can't think of any way that reverse dependencies could be
> easily found, unfortunately. If there really is no way to do this, then
> we could have a problem. I'm not sure rewriting tens of megabytes
> everytime you receive a mail message is acceptable.

You would not need to do that, since the messages don't change, and
thus their blobs remain the same.

However, for every manipulation of a message, you would need to
iterate *all* tag trees (O(n)) and update the ones referencing the
message (also O(n)).

The entire process will still be O(n) per message, and O(m×n) for
all:

  messages=[list of messages]
  add_tags=[list of tags to add]
  remove_tags=[list of tags to remove]
  tagtrees=[all tag trees]
  trees_to_update=[]

  for t in remove_tags:
    if intersection(t.tree.children, messages):
      T = new_tree(t.name)
      write_tree(T, t.tree.children - messages)
      write_tree(t.tree, [])
      t.tree = T

  for t in add_tags:
    t.tree = new_tree(t.name)
    rewrite_tree(t.tree, messages)

This can probably be further optimised, but still: it's not quite as
nice as enumerating all parents of a message in O(1) time (which
would still result in O(m×n)).

-- 
martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/
 
"... (ethik und ästhetik sind eins.)"
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