Re: [Evolution] Keeping states

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Wed, 2005-10-26 at 11:33 -0400, Joe Mason wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 11:44:19AM +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 21:59 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 09:22 +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 15:06 +0200, guenther wrote:
> > > > > * When switching folders, Evo remembers the selected mail and the
> > > > >   position in the mail list. This even works after closing Evo.
> > > >
> > > > no it doesn't.  I know it intends to, but it doesn't do a very good job
> > > > of it IMHO.  Please don't be upset by this remark, I'm just
> > > > commenting :)
> > >
> > > actually it does, but a particular message is not always in the exact
> > > same scroll position between sessions (new mail has arrived and perhaps
> > > the folder is in threaded view, etc).
> >
> > just to be annoying, no, it doesn't always.  Sometimes it remembers the
> > scroll position, but sometimes evo reverts to the "top" of the folder.
> > I notice this because I'm one of those weird people who reads messages
> > with the newest at the bottom.  Sometimes I leave a folder with the last
> > message selected (and scrolled to), and when I come back, evo is at the
> > very top of the list (ie. the oldest email).
>
> Seems like the best thing to keep is (a) which message is selected, and
> (b) which message is currently the topmost visible in the window.  Then
> you would scroll to (b) on returning to the folder, and altough it might
> scroll to somewhere different from the original place, it'll always at
> least have something to do with which messages were displayed before, no
> matter what scroll position they end up as.

Except that the message might no longer be there. People use a variety
of mailers, including multiple instances of Evo (I do, though they're
not concurrent). As long as the state is kept local to each instance and
not on the mail server, you can't know what happened between one
activation and the next, so you need a fallback. But given that people
can order the folder index on a lot of different fields, it's not clear
what the fallback should be. I'd be happier if it was the bottom message
rather than the top one, but that's just me. It would be nice to have it
configurable ...

poc