> Why should the backup not maintain a canonical form of all the aspects > of a mail system vs backing up on the way in which the data is stored. > A canonical form would have forced all versions to be able to backup and > restore with full backwards and forwards compatibility. > The canonical form could evolve with versioning of data forms as they > get more complex and programs evolve.
Sorry, I didn't really address the underlying aspect of what you are saying here. In the dim and distant past email was held in standardised data stores - i.e. mbox files. It was an almost universal standard and no matter what program you used, it could be read and modified and other programs would still be able to work with it. And Evolution used that standard. To all intents and purposes, that was the canonical form. Then some kind person invented MIME and the size of email messages expanded exponentially and all of a sudden the forever canonical form was not good enough - the files became too big, too unwieldy, too slow and things had to change. Similarly with configuration data - in the early days of Unix and a single INBOX on your local system, there was no configuration necessary - then POP, then IMAP, then Exchange all came along and something, somewhere had to remember what the program was supposed to do. There was no standard for such info so every program did its own thing. Evo did have a canonical form of the data, it was in flat files in the Evolution private folders, but that eventually became too slow and too fragile, so they changed to using gconf - which is now being deprecated in favour of dconf. What I'm trying to say is that 20:20 hindsight is a wonderful thing - but it is incredibly difficult to design a data storage format that is totally impervious to future changes and is efficient enough for everyday usage. I'm also fairly certain that if there was a standard for holding or exchanging account information and data between different programs, then Evo would have embraced it. Finally, I would just point out that the best way of maintaining email for use on multiple systems and that is fairly impervious to changes in version is to keep your mail on a server and access it using IMAP - that way you don't have to worry about moving data and if the upgrade procedure doesn't work, all you will ever have to do is to re-enter the account configuration. P. _______________________________________________ evolution-list mailing list [email protected] To change your list options or unsubscribe, visit ... https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
