In the message dated: Wed, 21 May 2008 15:27:03 EDT, The pithy ruminations from Paul Fox on <Re: [Nmh-workers] sync'ing an mh mailstore between two machines? > were: => tethys wrote: => > -------- => > => > Peter Maydell writes: => > => > >Just use rsync to copy the laptop's idea of the situation => > >onto the desktop again? (And vice-versa in the morning.) => > => > Bleurgh! It's a difficult problem to solve. Probably the best => > way is to use a DVCS for your mail store. They're generally => > explicitly designed for offline operation and resyncing of => > the repository when you get connectivity again. => > => > At this point, I couldn't really recommend anything other => > than git, because it's the only one I'm aware of that tracks => => well, this thread is certainly becoming more interesting than i => expected it to be. certainly using git never would have occurred => to me.
Hmm...I'll need to look into git some more. => => there's a very nice file tree syncing tool called "unison" that might => be useful as well -- i hadn't thought of it until peter mentioned rsync. => unfortunately it's no longer under active development, but in my => (limited) experience it works very well: => http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ => => i'll have to think about whether it would be appropriate in this case. => IMHO, the problem with tools like unison & rsync for this task is that they are oriented toward content differences between files of the same name, and dealing with missing/added files. The MH use presents a special case, in that we generally don't care much about a file's name, but we care a lot about the content and directory where the file is stored. In other words, I don't really care that the message that I am replying to is in a file named "691". I don't ever expect the content of the message associated with Message-Id <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> to change, but I do expect the name of the file where that content is saved to change. In the future, it may be in a file named 687, or 692. On the other hand, I do care that the file is stored in ~/Mail/My-Lists/nmh. This means that tools like rsync will work very hard to resolve the internal differences between file ~/Mail/My-Lists/nmh/691 on my laptop and the completely different message with the same name stored on my desktop. I really want to do some tests with the rsync option "--whole-file" to get around this problem, but I don't think that'll be sufficient, unless you can absolutely ensure that changes are never made on both machines...in which case the problem is trivial. Mark => paul => =--------------------- => paul fox, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (arlington, ma, where it's 63.7 degrees) => => => _______________________________________________ => Nmh-workers mailing list => [email protected] => http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers => _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
