On Sun, 2004-03-07 at 19:37, John J. Foster wrote: > On Sun, 2004-03-07 at 10:14, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: > > > Can this be done yet? > > > > no. in fact, 1.5 doesn't allow you to change the default folders away > > from mbox format anymore because the on-disk tree structure of the > > folders changed which makes it harder to do. > > Please correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't maildir a more efficient > format for alot of users? Why take that choice away?
depends on their usage scenario. most users won't notice a difference. there are good and bad things about both mbox and maildir... mbox is pretty wide-spread; just about every mail client in Unix (and some even in Windows) support it. This makes moving mailboxes to/from Evolution simpler. It also uses fewer inodes, which could theoretically be an issue with maildir depending on how much mail they get and what file system the user is using. > > This makes searching for individual emails with tools like grep > impossible. still works for me... but there is a specialised grep too for just this sort of thing too, if it suits your fancy: http://mboxgrep.org/ > > > > > If so, how? > > > If not, why? > > > > Probably a combination of the following: > > > > - never got around to it > huh > > - not enough users cared > There seemed to a bunch of interest in the archives. I personally haven't noticed that much, just a few people here and there mostly asking how to point to existing maildir trees (or so I thought, maybe I'm wrong... not exactly keeping track) > > - no one submitted a patch > Isn't that what you do? I hack on evolution full-time, yes. however, what I meant was that if it was really of interest to someone, they could always submit a patch to us (evolution being Free Software and all as in GPL etc). you'll also note that bugzilla.ximian.com is quite full of feature requests. I think just this past week the bug/feature-request count just got down to something like 30,000 (a good 50% are feature requests). That's a lot of feature requests... so as you can tell, we're pretty busy :-) anyways, all that said... I never said we *wouldn't* ever allow the ability to change formats, it just doesn't seem to be a highly desired feature right now. Perhaps we can add a way to decide what format to structure the entire Local Folders tree as (maildir vs mbox or whatever). This'd probably be the simplest and would satisfy maildir-wanting user's needs as well, since presumably if they want one maildir folder they'll want them all to be maildir. with the way 1.5 works (which is much simpler to deal with in the UI than in 1.4), it's non-trivial to go and change one mailbox at a time since the directory structure has been changed to closely resemble Mozilla Mail's folder tree structure. The way it worked in 1.4 is the following: ~/evolution/local/Inbox/ <-- Inbox folder ~/evolution/local/Inbox/mbox < actual mbox data ~/evolution/local/Inbox/local-metadata.xml <-- metadata specifying whether the folder is mbox, maildir, or mh format ~/evolution/local/Inbox/subfolders/SubFolder/ <-- subfolder folder ~/evolution/local/Inbox/subfolders/SubFolder/mbox <-- subfolder mbox data what used to happen when you changed a folder over to maildir from mbox was that the "mbox" file became a maildir directory instead and the local-metadata.xml file would be updated to specify the new format. The ugly part of it was that we had to have a special Local Store and Local Folder implementations that basically wrapped the mbox (or maildir) Store/Folder implementations. One store/folder combo per folder in the tree. This was kinda nasty overall. In 1.5, we simply have one mbox store that points to the toplevel "Local Folder" directory, and each mbox formatted file is just a Folder object rather than a Store/Folder pair like in 1.4. This not only makes it simpler but obviously also makes it use less memory :-) > > > > Jeff > It seems that the more you folks try to emulate Outlook, the more your > attitude becomes like theirs also. What's next, proprietary mailbox > format? I'm not sure what about our attitude makes us like Microsoft. We're pretty much as opposite of Microsoft as we can get. - we don't overcharge for our software (heck, it's free!) - our code is all free software (GPL) - we do our best to support standard formats (eg. we support mbox, maildir and mh...tho mh needs a bit of work I think - and that's just mail formats.) - we respect the ietf standards and do our best to comply with them (I think we do a fairly good job of it too) - we give out awards for patches (http://www.gnome.org/bounties) - instead of having to go thru tech support, you can speak with the developers directly... (maybe this isn't a good thing? :) Anyways, hope this clears things up... Jeff -- Jeffrey Stedfast Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] - www.ximian.com _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
