[Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
Hi. I've been getting into the code of evolution recently, and am thinking of doing a bit more to see if I can get it working OK for my situation. I have an IMAP mailbox which is very large, both in terms of folders (over 100) and messages (the largest folder has 300,000 messages; my INBOX has about 22,000). None of the email clients I've tried cope with this very well. Since I've been using evo at work in a similar setup (cyrus server, though not quite as big), I thought it might be the best to try to tweak. The problems I've had so far involve setup activities rather than core functionaility. First, evolution couldn't create the account (solved); second I've had problems getting it to show all of my subfolders. My narrow question is how to debug evolution. When I launched evolution in gdb evolution (the GUI) came up, and then the debugger told me the process had exited (though the GUI was up and running). I believe the initial process does some kind of activation of the real process and then exits. I know I can attach to the second process, but I think the stuff I need to see happens at startup. So how can I get a debugger on the startup process of the real evolution? I tried to search the archive, but the search function seems broken: it searches everything, even though it says search this list only. Also, evolution seems to have two presences on the web: a web site and a wiki. The developer stuff on the web site is old, and has no pointers to the newer stuff that I could find. It would be good if it did. I have some broader questions too, if anyone has any comments on them. What version to start with? I'm on Debian GNU/Linux, which currently has evo 2.6. I notice that's a bit dated (although I did see that a few months ago some of the Debian packagers were interested in making a more recent version). I've been working from the Debian version. Does that version, the last stable release (from evo, not Debian), or svn head make the most sense to work from? (BTW, the one bug I fixed was one that was already fixed post-2.6). Mission Impossible? Am I likely to get anywhere without spending lots of time? I'm a professional software developer, but I'm not familiar with GNOME, and this is clearly a complex application. Mission Advisable? If I get past the setup hurdles, is evolution likely to be able to handle the mail store I described? How do I find out which of the imap store's code I'm actually using? Thanks. Ross Boylan ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 23:14 +0530, Srinivasa Ragavan wrote: Hi, On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 07:58 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: Hi. I've been getting into the code of evolution recently, and am thinking of doing a bit more to see if I can get it working OK for my situation. I have an IMAP mailbox which is very large, both in terms of folders (over 100) and messages (the largest folder has 300,000 messages; my INBOX has about 22,000). None of the email clients I've tried cope with this very well. Since I've been using evo at work in a similar setup (cyrus server, though not quite as big), I thought it might be the best to try to tweak. The problems I've had so far involve setup activities rather than core functionaility. First, evolution couldn't create the account (solved); second I've had problems getting it to show all of my subfolders. My narrow question is how to debug evolution. When I launched evolution in gdb evolution (the GUI) came up, and then the debugger told me the process had exited (though the GUI was up and running). I believe the initial process does some kind of activation of the real process and then exits. Hmm, doesn't it give you a point to do 'bt' to get the traces? I don't think there's anything to trace, since the action is happening in another process. When I begin I am at the gdb command line. I was able to insert a breakpoint at what seemed like a good spot (this was a future breakpoint, since the relevant library hadn't loaded). Then when I did 'run' the GUI came up, and the program I was debugging exited. There was no error, and I didn't hit the breakpoint, so I don't think bt would be meaningful. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding and it is only one thread that has exited. But I see in main.c a lot of IDL code, and I know GNOME apps are supposed to be able to discover if they've already launched. I guessed (mostly by analogy with MS COM) that the initial program simply requests a service, and that is either conveyed to an existing instance of the app or a new instance is created. I know I can attach to the second process, but I think the stuff I need to see happens at startup. So how can I get a debugger on the startup process of the real evolution? -- Ross Boylan wk: (415) 514-8146 185 Berry St #5700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics fax: (415) 514-8150 University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94107-1739 hm: (415) 550-1062 ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 14:10 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 07:58 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: Hi. I've been getting into the code of evolution recently, and am thinking of doing a bit more to see if I can get it working OK for my situation. I have an IMAP mailbox which is very large, both in terms of folders (over 100) and messages (the largest folder has 300,000 messages; my INBOX has about 22,000). the largest INBOX I've ever used was about ~100,000 messages, so you may get to have some fun :) None of the email clients I've tried cope with this very well. Since I've been using evo at work in a similar setup (cyrus server, though not quite as big), I thought it might be the best to try to tweak. The problems I've had so far involve setup activities rather than core functionaility. First, evolution couldn't create the account (solved); second I've had problems getting it to show all of my subfolders. are they in different namespaces? Current evo IMAP provider doesn't handle multiple namespaces :( Single namespace. It's all INBOX.folder.subfolder. The one wrinkle is that in some cases 'folder' exists in the namespace, but is not an actual box or folder (whatever the right term is) on the server: INBOX.folder.subfolder is a real folder; INBOX.folder is not. My narrow question is how to debug evolution. When I launched evolution in gdb evolution (the GUI) came up, and then the debugger told me the process had exited (though the GUI was up and running). I believe the initial process does some kind of activation of the real process and then exits. sounds like you already had an instance of Evolution running (on another virtual desktop perhaps?) I'm pretty sure I shut everything down. Hmm, I just tried again and this time I'm still in the debugger. There was another instance of evolution running, but for a different user. That instance is in a funny state, because it is not visible in the other user's screen. Running under KDE in all cases. Mission Advisable? If I get past the setup hurdles, is evolution likely to be able to handle the mail store I described? I think it'll be possible, there's lots of improvement that can be made to the current imap code :) I'm hoping it will be tolerable without improvements :) I think one of the main factors will be whether evo tries to get all the headers from each folder it operates on. Even if it does, if it only does it once and is otherwise responsive I'll be doing better than what I have now. At work, I think my biggest folder has about 85k messages, and evo is working fine. How do I find out which of the imap store's code I'm actually using? you are probably using the provider in evolution-data-server/camel/providers/imap Is the other not loaded, or does it depend on which option I picked for the server (I said IMAP4rev1). Thanks to everyone for the quick replies. Not having a functional email client is a big problem. I used to archive off my mail when it got to be too much. I thought it would be more convenient to have it consolidated under IMAP since, as a practical matter, once I archived the stuff it became invisible. So far, it's not so convenient! So far, I have tried evolution kmail (using it for now) thunderbird/icedove mulberry Apple's mail app claws mutt -- Ross Boylan wk: (415) 514-8146 185 Berry St #5700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics fax: (415) 514-8150 University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94107-1739 hm: (415) 550-1062 ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 23:14 +0530, Srinivasa Ragavan wrote: [Ross] What version to start with? I would prefer, if you can try it with Evolution 2.10.2. It is the most recent stable release. Is EVOLUTION_DATA_SERVER_1_10_2 the corresponding tag to use for evolution-data-server? -- Ross Boylan wk: (415) 514-8146 185 Berry St #5700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics fax: (415) 514-8150 University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94107-1739 hm: (415) 550-1062 ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 23:20 +0200, Øystein Gisnås wrote: 2007/5/31, Matthew Barnes [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 07:58 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: What version to start with? I'm on Debian GNU/Linux, which currently has evo 2.6. I notice that's a bit dated (although I did see that a few months ago some of the Debian packagers were interested in making a more recent version). I've been working from the Debian version. Does that version, the last stable release (from evo, not Debian), or svn head make the most sense to work from? (BTW, the one bug I fixed was one that was already fixed post-2.6). FYI, Debian Unstable has Evolution 2.10. Might be easier to grab at least the 2.10 dependencies from there. You'll need to upgrade gtkhtml and likely also your GTK+ library stack to get 2.10 to build. In case you're on a Debian-based distribution Yes; straight Debian. and not pulling from svn, I would recommend using pre-built packages, or even building the packages yourself. 2.10.2 is in the archive, and I will do 2.11.2 this weekend. Terrific. Is unstable the place to look, or experimental, or somewhere else? For my own development setup I use the 2.10.x packages plus custom build from svn for the module I'm hacking on. e-d-s for example, I install to /opt/evolution-data-server. Then I can start development e-d-s with 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/evolution-data-server/lib /opt/evolution-data-server/libexec/evolution-data-server-1.12' and can also start the stable e-d-s with '/usr/lib/evolution/evolution-data-server-1.10' That's a great tip. I built evo from Debian source (with one fix) and it took 45 minutes. I clearly need a shorter route to trying out changes. Thanks for packing evo, and for making the -dbg files available. Ross -- Ross Boylan wk: (415) 514-8146 185 Berry St #5700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics fax: (415) 514-8150 University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94107-1739 hm: (415) 550-1062 ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Thursday 31 May 2007 16:09, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 17:18 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: [snip] Single namespace. It's all INBOX.folder.subfolder. The one wrinkle is that in some cases 'folder' exists in the namespace, but is not an actual box or folder (whatever the right term is) on the server: INBOX.folder.subfolder is a real folder; INBOX.folder is not. I guess just a bug I don't have a build environment anymore so I can't easily test this patch, but perhaps i will fix your missing folder troubles. I'm not sure that the names that aren't folders problem is causing any of the problems I'm seeing. While such names don't appear in the folder list on the left pane, I also have plenty of ordinary folders that aren't appearing. And the ghost folders, along with their children, do show up in the Folder| subscription dialogue. evolution seems to insist on showing only subscribed folders, even when I disable the show only subscribed folders option. Since the ghost folders aren't folders, there is no way I can subscribe to them. So if I wanted to see only subscribed folders, that might create a problem. I was able to start up evo under the debugger on the system that's having problems, and this time it worked. Yay! I put future breakpoints on camel_store_supports_subscriptions, and (following the location of the patches you provided) imap4_build_folder_info. I also put one on imap_build_folder_info (a wild guess). Unfortunately none of these were hit when evo started up and was deciding what to show. I did hit the camel_store_support_subscriptions when I opened the Folders | subscriptions dialogue. I tried creating an IMAP type account. This did hit imap_build_folder_info, and it did show all my folders (including ghosts). Performance seems pretty good. I'm going to stop for now, while I'm ahead. ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 17:11 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 12:23 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: On Thu, 2007-06-07 at 09:25 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: it's not possible to do better w/o dropping features like message threading. In fact, the above minimalizing of header fetching already breaks the quick context-menu vfolder on mailing-list and filter on mailing-list features as well as making vfoldering on mailing-list oodles slower (if it even still works after disabling the headers) What about letting the server do the threading, if it can? 1. not all servers support it, so we need to implement threading client-side anyway 2. not all servers do it /correctly/, so we'd need to have a lookup table of server idents so we knew when to fallback (note that every mail client I know of that tried to be smart and let the server do the threading has lived to regret making this decision) The parenthetical remark is pretty interesting. 3. if threading behavior is different from other accounts, it will feel weird to the user. All good points. I should explain I'm thinking of a mode that might kick in only on large mailboxes, or as a user option or something like that. My main concern is that with very large folders most mail cients, including evolution, become sluggish to the point of being unusable. For many of the clients life is much uglier during the initial contact with the folders than later. For example, when I move a message into a folder I haven't opened or operated on in evolution, I'm noticing long delays (like 1 minute) while it does something (fetch headers and create an index? whatever it is uses some, but not all the CPU). In this context an responsive but imperfect solution is better than an unresponsive perfect one. For example, if evo relies on the server's threads then it will obviously inherit their behavior, warts and all. In general I agree with the point, made recently on this list, that it's desirable for clients to shield users from server problems (and most users don't know and don't care that the the real problem is with the server). But if doing so takes forever, some may be willing to give up on that. Whether relaying on server side threading, which currently only operates on the whole mailbox, can solve the performance problems is another issue. I realize not all can, and probably all will seem not as smart as they could be (or just different from how threading would be done in evolution). But otherwise, there's no way around getting lots of headers, and that is a huge hit with big folders. That's the theory; the practice seems uglier. I tried mulberry, which is supposed to make very good use of IMAP. In many ways it does, but its use of server-side threading doesn't work too well. It seemed to get the response back quickly from the server, but then take minutes processing and parsing this response. Furthermore, every time one scrolls the window, it does it all over again. The other problem with server-side threading is that it threads everything. In principle it might make more sense to retrieve a window of headers and thread them. actually, I think this is what Mulberry is doing - or at least that would make sense if it has to re-fetch thread info when you scroll. My impression, based partly on what a (the?) Mulberry developer said, is that Mulberry gets the entire threaded list from the server. The time seems to go into the post-processing, and apparently this gets redone every time you scroll. (The developer thought it was time parsing the response string from the server, though I would think building up a virtual message list window is a more likely culprit). BTW, in case people aren't aware, Mulberry was recently open-sourced. The window might not include all items in the thread, but that seems a reasonable trade-off to me in return for decent performance. One could do a more thorough job in the background and update when it finished. but then you have items in the list moving around as more thread info becomes available which would be annoying to users, imho. Worst case the display of the results could be deferred until something else, like a user hitting a scrollbar, causes a display update. But I don't see how this case differs from other things that might change the display, such as the arrival of new mail. Ross ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 18:27 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 15:13 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 17:11 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 12:23 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: . All good points. I should explain I'm thinking of a mode that might kick in only on large mailboxes, or as a user option or something like that. My main concern is that with very large folders most mail cients, including evolution, become sluggish to the point of being unusable. For many of the clients life is much uglier during the initial contact with the folders than later. For example, when I move a message into a folder I haven't opened or operated on in evolution, I'm noticing long delays (like 1 minute) while it does something (fetch headers and create an index? whatever it is uses some, but not all the CPU). yea, it's creating a summary. IMHO, the design needs to change such that a CamelFolder object need not load the summary when instantiated. If that gets implemented, then there's no need to hit the server to sync summary info before the object gets returned to the caller who requested it, thus allowing appends w/o this particular slowness. This is all part of my camel architecture redesign ideas that I had started implementing in libspruce as a testbed. I think Michael Zucchi even started to implement this in the disk-summary branch (it basically boiled down to ::open() and ::close() methods on a CamelFolder object) Why does it need to create a CamelFolder for the destination at all, assuming I keep the focus on the source folder? Actually, I guess I don't know if IMAP copy/delete is happening behind the scenes, or if camel is creating the message from scratch in the target folder. The latter is a lot more work (though probably easier to implement). Second question: even if it creates a folder, does it need to stick around for the folder creation to finish? I think I remember seeing that camel was single-threaded, relying on the client app to do threading. Would there be a way to multi-thread this somewhere (either in camel or in the app)? Obviously doing so would complicate things, because at some point one might need to block (e.g., if I move a message from folder A to B and then switch the UI to look at B). In this context an responsive but imperfect solution is better than an unresponsive perfect one. I would argue that it's not a perfect solution if it's unresponsive :) For sure. For example, if evo relies on the server's threads then it will obviously inherit their behavior, warts and all. In general I agree with the point, made recently on this list, that it's desirable for clients to shield users from server problems (and most users don't know and don't care that the the real problem is with the server). But if doing so takes forever, some may be willing to give up on that. Whether relaying on server side threading, which currently only operates on the whole mailbox, can solve the performance problems is another issue. it doesn't operate on the whole mailbox, it operates on a seqid or uid set afaik. been a while since I've read the specs I was mistaken about threading being only for the whole box. I just looked at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-imapext-sort-18.txt and see you can add additional search specifications to limit your thread request. Of course, clients might still ask for all the threads. Though I've mostly focused on responsiveness, the index the whole folder strategy also impacts bandwidth (as Philip pointed out) and local disk useage. Ross ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 20:22 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: Why does it need to create a CamelFolder for the destination at all, assuming I keep the focus on the source folder? because you need both a source and a destination folder to move the message(s) to? kinda hard to move messages to a folder if you don't know which folder to move them to, don't you agree? :) All you need for IMAP is the name of the target folder, not the fuller representation that CamelFolder provides. In particular, there's no need to fetch the headers from the destination folder, index them, etc. As you observe, I'm not too familiar with camel's internals: just a quick look at the docs and a little debugging. So I don't know if such a minimalist approach would play very well in that framework. Ross ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 20:22 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: [Ross wrote] Second question: even if it creates a folder, does it need to stick around for the folder creation to finish? I think I remember seeing that camel was single-threaded not true... , relying on the client app to do threading. Would there be a way to multi-thread this somewhere (either in camel or in the app)? Obviously doing so would complicate things, because at some point one might need to block (e.g., if I move a message from folder A to B and then switch the UI to look at B). okay, I think you need to familiarize yourself with Camel's API before we discuss anything further :) http://www.go-evolution.org/Mail_Threading begins The Camel API is blocking and synchronous although it then goes on to qualify this: Custom Threads Two tasks inside Camel use threads internally in order to implement a cancellable api ontop of a non-cancellable one. Further Mail-OPS mail-ops.h contains asynchronous versions of varous Camel api's It sounds as if mail-ops is outside of Camel, however. So it sounds as if Camel could (in principle) respond to a move request by issuing the appropriate IMAP command and then, starting a thread to do the other activities (indexing the target folder and deleting the the message from the source folder) and return. It would then block on operations that attempted to access the target folder until the other operations completed. I think this could be called a syncronous API, though perhaps that's a stretch. On the other hand, http://www.go-evolution.org/Camel.Operation does not sound like a bocking syncronous API at all, so maybe the statement quoted at the top is just obsolete? So, first of all I'm confused about the nature of Camel's API and operation as far as threading and syncronicity. Second, I don't have a sense of whether its features are historical accidents (camel was implemented in a simple way and evo then used it as it was) or the result of some deliberate design decisions. Blocking syncronous operations are simpler to implement, to use, to debug, and to understand, so they clearly have some advantages. But it seems that the entire application (evolution) does not have that character, so the benefits of that simplicity end up lost anyway. ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
I'm preserving the exchange for context; my responses are sprinkled below. On Sun, 2007-06-10 at 23:47 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: On Sun, 2007-06-10 at 15:55 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: On Fri, 2007-06-08 at 20:22 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: Second question: even if it creates a folder, does it need to stick around for the folder creation to finish? I think I remember seeing that camel was single-threaded not true... I should have been clearer here: yes, it needs to wait for the folder object instantiation to finish (the function returns a pointer to the instantiated object, afterall). And your proposal with open on that object is designed to decouple creation of the object from creation of the summary, right? When I said folder creation I was thinking of the whole get headers and make index process. not true that camel is single-threaded - it has a few of its own threads going - most notably is the thread for filtering incoming mail for providers like imap and maildir (they share the same thread). , relying on the client app to do threading. Would there be a way to multi-thread this somewhere (either in camel or in the app)? Obviously doing so would complicate things, because at some point one might need to block (e.g., if I move a message from folder A to B and then switch the UI to look at B). okay, I think you need to familiarize yourself with Camel's API before we discuss anything further :) http://www.go-evolution.org/Mail_Threading begins The Camel API is blocking and synchronous although it then goes on to qualify this: Custom Threads Two tasks inside Camel use threads internally in order to implement a cancellable api ontop of a non-cancellable one. Further Mail-OPS mail-ops.h contains asynchronous versions of varous Camel api's It sounds as if mail-ops is outside of Camel, however. it is external to camel, yes. So it sounds as if Camel could (in principle) respond to a move request by issuing the appropriate IMAP command and then, starting a thread to do the other activities (indexing the target folder and deleting the the message from the source folder) and return. it could, yes, but it'd need a way to report an error unless it waited for the operations to finish before returning. For moving mail, you typically want to know that it succeeded :) all of the current camel APIs are designed such that the caller expects that when the function returns, the operation has either succeeded or failed (where the failure would be set on the CamelException argument). It would then block on operations that attempted to access the target folder until the other operations completed. yes, this is true... well, the way folders are implemented at this time anyway... I think this could be called a syncronous API, though perhaps that's a stretch. it is indeed a synchronous API :) Syncronous, but it fails the you know if you've succeeded when the function returns test. On the other hand, http://www.go-evolution.org/Camel.Operation does not sound like a bocking syncronous API at all, so maybe the statement quoted at the top is just obsolete? Camel code is written under the assumption that it is likely it is being used in a thread, so it has CamelOperation as a means to: 1. report the progress 2. cancel operations (typically i/o) what happens is Evolution has a thread-pool with a CamelOperation object for each of the threads the mailer creates so that it can cancel operations and/or get progress updates. This part of the camel API is not syncronous, right? So, first of all I'm confused about the nature of Camel's API and operation as far as threading and syncronicity. Second, I don't have a sense of whether its features are historical accidents (camel was implemented in a simple way and evo then used it as it was) evolution mailer was originally not multi-threaded if my recollection serves correctly, although around the time of the first 0.0 release threading was added (about 7 years ago). camel and evolution were developed together, so their designs evolved together. Why was camel separated out at all? Side note: when I first was trying to figure out what was going on, I looked in the evo sources and discovered the code wasn't there, but was in the evo-data-server. This was confusing because, at least on debian, the latter was described as providing calendar and address book functions. I think the Debian split mirrors the what I see in your repository. My current guess is that some of the code in evolution-data-server (the directory) is really for evolution, and not for the evo-data-server application. or the result of some deliberate design decisions. Blocking syncronous operations are simpler to implement, yep to use, yep to debug, yep, altho with threads thrown
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 09:46 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: Speaking of complexity, evolution/camel (and maybe Gnome?) do a kind of objects with C. Why not just use C++? Was the C++ toolchain too unreliable at the start, or was there some other reason? I didn't mean to exclude other alternatives. The general question was if you're doing objects anyway, why not use a language that already supports them? -- Ross Boylan wk: (415) 514-8146 185 Berry St #5700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics fax: (415) 514-8150 University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94107-1739 hm: (415) 550-1062 ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Introduction and Questions
On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 14:39 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote: So it sounds as if Camel could (in principle) respond to a move request by issuing the appropriate IMAP command and then, starting a thread to do the other activities (indexing the target folder and deleting the the message from the source folder) and return. it could, yes, but it'd need a way to report an error unless it waited for the operations to finish before returning. For moving mail, you typically want to know that it succeeded :) all of the current camel APIs are designed such that the caller expects that when the function returns, the operation has either succeeded or failed (where the failure would be set on the CamelException argument). It would then block on operations that attempted to access the target folder until the other operations completed. yes, this is true... well, the way folders are implemented at this time anyway... I think this could be called a syncronous API, though perhaps that's a stretch. it is indeed a synchronous API :) Syncronous, but it fails the you know if you've succeeded when the function returns test. most of the camel APIs don't fail that test This was in the context of something I was thinking of (So it sounds as if Camel could ). The feature/change I was contemplating sounds as if it would be a bad idea because it violates the usual model for camel calls. Probably either a smaller change (keeping the blocking/syncronous/useful return values in place) or a bigger one (general asyncronicity) would be a better idea--at least in a perfect world of infinite coding time.:) In fact, your idea with folder open preserves the expected features of the camel API. -- Ross Boylan wk: (415) 514-8146 185 Berry St #5700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics fax: (415) 514-8150 University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94107-1739 hm: (415) 550-1062 ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
[Evolution-hackers] Difficulty of storing flags on IMAP server
I believe that some of the flags associated with messages (e.g., follow-up) are stored by the evolution client, rather than kept on the server. For at least some IMAP servers it should be possible to define custom flags on the server and use them. This would be very useful to me, since I'm accessing the mail from different locations. Any idea how big a job this would be to add? I might do it, if it's easy. BTW, is anyone planning on working on the problem that messages flagged initially flagged as follow-up and later flagged as completed still show up when you filter by follow-up? Thanks. Ross ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
Re: [Evolution-hackers] Difficulty of storing flags on IMAP server
On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 18:29 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote: On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 09:18 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: I believe that some of the flags associated with messages (e.g., follow-up) are stored by the evolution client, rather than kept on the server. For at least some IMAP servers it should be possible to define custom flags on the server and use them. This would be very useful to me, since I'm accessing the mail from different locations. Any idea how big a job this would be to add? I might do it, if it's easy. BTW, is anyone planning on working on the problem that messages flagged initially flagged as follow-up and later flagged as completed still show up when you filter by follow-up? Search for CAMEL_MESSAGE_INFO_USER_FLAGS and uses of mi-user_flags in Camel (better search for -user_flags as that mi part is sometimes called info and sometimes with a bunch of casting around it called mi). In camel-imap-folder.c you can take an example from functions like flags_to_label. I guess you'll need to convert your user_flags to custom IMAP flags somehow. Not sure how easy that is. I guess there's one way to find out:) I suppose, broadly, that there are 2 approaches. One would be to mirror the IMAP flags and the local flags; that would isolate the places that need to change. The other would be to integrate the knowledge that the flags were in the server more fully into the application. It looks as if some message status information is already obtained from the server (e.g., flagged as important; seen; replied to) for IMAP, so maybe extending that wouldn't be too hard. You can also add new tags (user_tags), which is similar to how user_flags work in Camel. It looks like those are already stored remotely. I think tags define the colour of the rows in your summary view (Important, Personal, Work, etc etc). You'll have to write ui pieces for this too, in Evolution, of course. Why do I need to add a ui? I'm thinking the user experience would be the same; it all happens behind the scenes. Thanks for the info. -- Ross Boylan wk: (415) 514-8146 185 Berry St #5700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics fax: (415) 514-8150 University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94107-1739 hm: (415) 550-1062 ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
[Evolution-hackers] Is there a reason copy does't preserve mark for followup?
Using evolution 2.10 (but with 1.12 backend) on Debian I notice that when I copy a folder the flagged as important is preserved but the mark for followup is not. I'm guessing most other marks are not preserved either (though replied is preserved). The code seems to show a few state variables are all coded into one binary variable; I'm guessing these are preserved. They also seem to be stored on the IMAP server. My copies were all on or between IMAP servers, using the IMAP server type. Is preserving the other elements of message state (e.g., mark for followup) simply a missing feature, or is there some reason this doesn't happen? In particular, is it missing because it's hard to do? I'm moving significant amounts of mail between servers; unfortunately, I didn't notice some of the info was being lost until it was too late. I'm also poking around to see about saving additional state on the IMAP server; some folks gave me some pointers earlier. Thanks. -- Ross Boylan wk: (415) 514-8146 185 Berry St #5700 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics fax: (415) 514-8150 University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94107-1739 hm: (415) 550-1062 ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
[Evolution-hackers] any point in server side indices?
Cyrus has a facility to maintain indices on the server. Will such indices help evolution? I know it tends to build its own indices, and so suspect the server side indices are irrelevant (I think it takes an IMAP SEARCH command to access them). I'm on evo 2.22 on Debian Lenny. Thanks. Ross Boylan ___ Evolution-hackers mailing list Evolution-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-hackers
