Re: [Evolution] No way yet to make maildir default format ?

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Sun, 2004-03-07 at 19:37, John J. Foster wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-03-07 at 10:14, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> > > Can this be done yet?
> >
> > no. in fact, 1.5 doesn't allow you to change the default folders away
> > from mbox format anymore because the on-disk tree structure of the
> > folders changed which makes it harder to do.
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't maildir a more efficient
> format for alot of users? Why take that choice away?

depends on their usage scenario. most users won't notice a difference.

there are good and bad things about both mbox and maildir... mbox is
pretty wide-spread; just about every mail client in Unix (and some even
in Windows) support it. This makes moving mailboxes to/from Evolution
simpler. It also uses fewer inodes, which could theoretically be an
issue with maildir depending on how much mail they get and what file
system the user is using.

> This makes searching for individual emails with tools like grep
> impossible. 

still works for me...

but there is a specialised grep too for just this sort of thing too, if
it suits your fancy:

http://mboxgrep.org/

> > > If so, how?
> > > If not, why?
> >
> > Probably a combination of the following:
> >
> > - never got around to it
> huh
> > - not enough users cared
> There seemed to a bunch of interest in the archives.

I personally haven't noticed that much, just a few people here and there
mostly asking how to point to existing maildir trees (or so I thought,
maybe I'm wrong... not exactly keeping track)

> > - no one submitted a patch
> Isn't that what you do?

I hack on evolution full-time, yes. however, what I meant was that if it
was really of interest to someone, they could always submit a patch to
us (evolution being Free Software and all as in GPL etc).

you'll also note that bugzilla.ximian.com is quite full of feature
requests. I think just this past week the bug/feature-request count just
got down to something like 30,000 (a good 50% are feature requests).
That's a lot of feature requests... so as you can tell, we're pretty
busy :-)

anyways, all that said... I never said we *wouldn't* ever allow the
ability to change formats, it just doesn't seem to be a highly desired
feature right now. Perhaps we can add a way to decide what format to
structure the entire Local Folders tree as (maildir vs mbox or
whatever). This'd probably be the simplest and would satisfy
maildir-wanting user's needs as well, since presumably if they want one
maildir folder they'll want them all to be maildir.

with the way 1.5 works (which is much simpler to deal with in the UI
than in 1.4), it's non-trivial to go and change one mailbox at a time
since the directory structure has been changed to closely resemble
Mozilla Mail's folder tree structure.

The way it worked in 1.4 is the following:

~/evolution/local/Inbox/      <-- Inbox folder
~/evolution/local/Inbox/mbox  < actual mbox data
~/evolution/local/Inbox/local-metadata.xml   <-- metadata specifying
whether the folder is mbox, maildir, or mh format
~/evolution/local/Inbox/subfolders/SubFolder/  <-- subfolder folder
~/evolution/local/Inbox/subfolders/SubFolder/mbox  <-- subfolder mbox
data

what used to happen when you changed a folder over to maildir from mbox
was that the "mbox" file became a maildir directory instead and the
local-metadata.xml file would be updated to specify the new format.

The ugly part of it was that we had to have a special Local Store and
Local Folder implementations that basically wrapped the mbox (or
maildir) Store/Folder implementations. One store/folder combo per folder
in the tree. This was kinda nasty overall.

In 1.5, we simply have one mbox store that points to the toplevel "Local
Folder" directory, and each mbox formatted file is just a Folder object
rather than a Store/Folder pair like in 1.4.

This not only makes it simpler but obviously also makes it use less
memory :-)

> > Jeff
> It seems that the more you folks try to emulate Outlook, the more your
> attitude becomes like theirs also. What's next, proprietary mailbox
> format?

I'm not sure what about our attitude makes us like Microsoft. We're
pretty much as opposite of Microsoft as we can get.

- we don't overcharge for our software (heck, it's free!)
- our code is all free software (GPL)
- we do our best to support standard formats (eg. we support mbox,
maildir and mh...tho mh needs a bit of work I think - and that's just
mail formats.)
- we respect the ietf standards and do our best to comply with them (I
think we do a fairly good job of it too)
- we give out awards for patches (http://www.gnome.org/bounties)
- instead of having to go thru tech support, you can speak with the
developers directly... (maybe this isn't a good thing? :)

Anyways, hope this clears things up...

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com