RE: [Evolution] evolution folder layout

["Matt Loper" <matt helixcode com>]

jwz wrote:
> This feels inside out to me; I'd expect Mail/Trash and Calendar/Trash
> instead of Trash/Mail and Trash/Calendar, and also Mail/Inbox rather
> than Inbox/Mail.

The "mail.*" files won't actually be seen in the tree; those files are just
a part of the data that will be swept up into the "Inbox" folder in a user's
treeview.

> Though it also seems sensible to me for Trash to not be a disk file at
> all, but to be auto-generated somehow.

Yup; trash will have to be a vFolder, for a bunch of reasons.

> Remember that people are going to want to use procmail, so effectively
> every mail folder is going to be an inbox (in the sense of,
> new messages
> asynchronously appear.)  This is something you have to build
> in from the
> start, since you're building a Unix-only client.  So devoting a
> top-level directory to all inboxes is not going to mesh with the way a
> lot of people are actually going to use the software.

A few points:
* We're not creating a toplevel directory for all inboxes.
* We'll have our own filtering mechanism, that will do a lot of what
procmail does.
* The Inbox could be a vFolder. Having a single place where new messages
(including those on an imap server) appear seems reasonable to me. Then
again, some aspects of vFolders (deleting and adding single messages wrt a
vFolder) could get in the way.

> Naming things "My_" is stupid -- it's in my home directory, of course
> it's mine.

I did this to make it clear that the name "calendar.cal" has no relation
with its parent folder, "My_Calendar". But let me make the issue more clear.
You could have something like this:

evolution/folders
   |
   `- my_stupid_mail
       my_stupid_mail.mbox
       my_stupid_mail.summary
       my_stupid_mail.ibex

This sucks, because Evolution should have to change the name in only one
place to avoid inconsistency (could happen w/ nfs going down, etc.).

So instead, we have...

evolution/folders
   |
   `- my_stupid_mail
       mail.mbox
       mail.summary
       mail.ibex
       (etc.)

This means that the type of item is specified by the filename, but more
importantly, the name of the folder is in only one place. I've even heard
that this will work for internationlization. You could also have...

evolution/folders
   |
   `- my_stupid_mail
       mbox
       summary
       ibex
       (etc.)

...which would be fine with me.

In case I still haven't made myself clear, another valid directory
structure, as configured by a user, might be as follows. There are files
inside each of the directories, but they've been left out for clarity.

evolution
    |
    `- folders
         |
         |- Inbox
         |- mailing-lists
         |    |
         |    |- evolution
         |    `- spidermonkey
         |
         |- Home calendar (treeitems can be toplevel...)
         |- Business calendar
         |
         |- Addressbooks
         |     |
         |     |- business (...or in other folders)
         |     `- home
         |
         `- Trash
               |
               |- mail
               |- calendar
               `- addressbook

So is it your idea that we have a trash folder under "Inbox",
"mailing-lists", "evolution", "business", etc.? Should the trash folder have
a trash folder inside it? :-)

> Using underscores in file names is also foul -- this isn't C,
> you're not
> parsing arithmetic tokens, so use hyphens.  StudlyCaps are foul too.

hmm. Fine, we'll use spaces :-)

-Matt