Re: possible new sort option

[Jack <ostroffjh users sourceforge net>]

On 08/02/2018 07:08 PM, Peter Bloomfield wrote:
> Hi Jack,
>
> On 08/01/2018 05:04:29 PM Wed, Jack via balsa-list wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > Too much idle time, perhaps, but I've been musing on mailbox 
> > sorting.  I mostly use JWZ sorting, with increasing dates.  This 
> > groups messages per the JWZ algorithm, and then sorts the groups by 
> > the increasing date of the first message in the group.  If I click on 
> > the date colulmn header, it simply reverses the order of presentation 
> > of the groups.   In other words, the ordering within groups is not 
> > changed, but now the groups are sorted by the decreasing date of the 
> > first message in the group.
> >
> > I have several mailboxes (mainly various mailing lists) where I'd 
> > like to maintain the message order within the groups as above, but 
> > sort the groups by the date of the most recent message in the group - 
> > either increasing or decreasing.  This would bring the most recently 
> > active threads to the top or bottom of the list.
>
> That would be much preferable to the current situation, where a recent 
> reply in an old group gets lost back in time; I often have to switch 
> to the flat view in order to find it, then back to threaded to see it 
> in context.
That's exactly my use case.
> Worse yet is the JWZ prescription of grouping by subject, so that a 
> reply to "Tomorrow's meeting" gets grouped with all the other, mostly 
> unrelated, messages with that subject! But I digress…
I still like JWZ in general.  I have actually gotten around to mailing 
JWZ himself, but I have no idea whether to expect a response or not.  My 
first thought (with absolutely no idea how realistic it is) is to simply 
modify the JWZ implementation so that a message may never be indented 
before a message with a later date.  I haven't gone through the 
algorithm in detail to see if there is any way to do that without a 
total rewrite.
> > Can anybody give an estimate of how difficult this would be to 
> > implement?
>
> As I recall, from many years ago when it was discussed, it's not 
> difficult to implement, but the simplest implementation might be 
> inefficient. It might take a bit of work to implement without loss of 
> performance.
Given your take on JWZ, I see two short term approaches (it would be 
interesting to compare them, but I doubt anyone has enough time.) One 
would be to do the JWZ as currently implemented, keeping a list of the 
top message in each group along with the latest date of any message in 
the group.  Then do a final sort of that list to order the groups.  I 
don't know if the other would be a similar modification of one of the 
other current threading methods, or would need to be done from scratch.

More pondering, I think....
> Peter
Jack