Kurt Hackenberg writes: > VM followed that model -- no concurrent visiting of a given folder -- > and should continue to, IMHO, for local folders. (Or apparently > local, like NFS.) Partly because VM works by editing the whole mbox > file, and would have to be redesigned to work any other way. > > But you're talking about VM being an IMAP client, aren't you? And > assuming that other clients on other computers are modifying the IMAP > folder concurrently.
Indeed, I am talking about IMAP folders. For local folders, there is no possibility of concurrent usage (not unless file systems start understanding email). The No. 1 reason for switching to IMAP is to get concurrent access. The IMAP server is in a sense a "file system that understands email". > I don't have much opinion, but sort of like the idea of things > happening immediately. IMAP can do that, and sort of looks like it's > meant to. How do other IMAP clients do it? It would be possible to add a timer task that wakes up every N seconds and synchronizes the VM folder with the IMAP server. That is how, I think, Thunderbird and perhaps other clients do it. They don't have a "SAVE" button. To be consistent, we also need to update the cache folder on disk when we update the IMAP server. The main problem with providing such a function is that it is at odds with the Emacs philosophy. Long-time Emacs users are used to the idea that they can make changes to buffers inside Emacs and discard the changes if things go wrong. In VM, I often end up expunging a folder and then realizing that I shouldn't have. Then I can reload the folder and return to the version on the disk or the server. If the changes get saved asynchronously without my control, I would lose that ability to discard. > I think it's acceptable for VM to have that difference in timing > between IMAP folders and local folders. VM users are knowledgeable > enough not to be confused by that. (Emacs is a programmer's editor, > and VM strikes me as a programmer's mail reader. I expect that > everybody who uses either program is technically knowledgeable. The > general public doesn't know that Emacs and VM exist, much less use > them, and never will.) Yup. I think I agree. Cheers, Uday
