Donn Cave wrote:
Quoth Clemens <clemens.zeidler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, ...... More interesting for me is for example how to implement the local cache? The local storage should be robust against fs crashes, think that is not trivial to implement.Is Anshul's proposal to simply create a BFS file for each message unworkable? I don't know enough about how that would need to be implemented. I assume location of cache files would default to /boot.
This whole discussion has been really unfocussed; I think because every one of the contributors has a different idea of what the project should be about. I suspect Anshul is new to the community and therefore doesn't know yet which voices carry more weight within the project (ie when writing a GSoC proposal, Stippi and Ingo should definitely be listened to, and Clemens as the person to last work on the current Haiku mail infrastructure is also an important voice...)
I have no doubt that Donn has very good knowledge of the IMAP protocol and can provide useful hints and tips, but he will not be involved in the GSoC decision making process. I'm also not sure if he's aware of the current email situation on Haiku (Anshul, are you aware of that too?) In other words we have the mail daemon that can handle IMAP, download each message to a seperate file on the BFS partition, set the attributes to values from the headers, work with partial messages, etc. A large part of the discussion seemed to be about implementing these things, which are all there already!
An IMAP client that stores mails in BFS is precisely what we have now. Doing just that in a separate filesystem would have the very slight advantage that deletions could be properly tracked (although there is obviously disagreement about the semantics that should be implemented). For me the real problem with storing mails as separate files in BFS is the performance hit. For example my Inbox has 18658 mails in it and Tracker takes an absolute age to list them all. Thunderbird on the other hand can present me a list instantly. I'm not sure how much of the slowness is due to BFS and how much to Tracker, but IMHO that's they key problem that I'd hope an IMAP-FS would solve.
Still, I'm yet another voice that will not be involved in the GSoC decision so don't pay too much attention to me Anshul!
Simon
