On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 08:30 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 13:19 +0000, Pete Biggs wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 04:10 -0500, [email protected] wrote:
> > > Huh?
> > > Many people don't leave their messages on ISP servers because of quotas,
> > Get a better ISP.
> > > so then they get downloaded to their local machine. Where you want fast,
> > > reliable access to them (e.g. searching, sorting, etc.) Unfortunately,
> > > without ACID principles, your local email will get corrupted. And most
> > > don't want that.
> > > Because database technology (embedded or otherwise), use things called
> > > 'transactions' it protects the data. If you brew your own 'local storage
> > > system' like Evolution, you have what we have now which is unreliable and
> > > slow.
> > My turn to say "Huh?".
> > In what way has Evo "brewed" it's own storage system?  It uses standard
> > MBOX files on top of the native filesystem.  That's about as standard as
> > it gets.  
> 
> I say - "Heh?". ;)  
> 
> Because I come down on the other side;  the app might be better off if
> they "brewed" their own storage format [like Cyrus IMAP did] and ditched
> the "standard" crap [my opinion of both mbox and maildir].  An
> application's data should be a sealed container and accessed only via an
> API / service
> 


My opinion is: Evolution based its design on well excepted UNIX
standards at the time (late nineties). Now, whether that standard is
still relevant today may be debatable.

I think an example of a "brewed" storage format is that of Outlook 's
opaque mail information store. When a relative experiences a corrupted
Outlook file, I just shrug my shoulders as there is little I can do.
However with Evolution, because it uses "standard" message stores, I can
use tools like "mutt" to fix my MBOX files and recover from various
problems.

I also have experienced more problems with Evo's sqllite's index files
than I have ever experienced with the MBOX format. Thank goodness the
sqllite database only stores information that can be re-constructed from
the MBOX files.

I am a database guy. I do a ton of Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres and
Mysql work. However even I recognize a database is not a solution for
everything.

Cheers,
Rob   


> > All the rest of the stuff that Evo uses (like the index files)
> > are purely to try and speed up searching and accessing those files.
> > There's no doubt that MBOX files can be fragile if you get impatient and
> > interrupt a program's access to them while they are being written,
> > especially if they are large - that's why Evo provides other file
> > formats - based on standards - such as Maildir and MH.
> > However, if you really feel that Evo would benefit from using some
> > proprietary format backed database for mail, then I'm sure the devs
> > would be more than happy to look at any code you submit.
> 
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-- 
Rob Seward
Bluestone Consulting Group, LLC

web:     http://www.bluestone-consulting.com/
e-mail:  [email protected]

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