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Re: [Evolution] What happened to Evolution?

On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 08:30 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote: 
On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 13:19 +0000, Pete Biggs wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 04:10 -0500, darren ontrenet com wrote:
> > Huh?
> > Many people don't leave their messages on ISP servers because of quotas,
> Get a better ISP.
> > so then they get downloaded to their local machine. Where you want fast,
> > reliable access to them (e.g. searching, sorting, etc.) Unfortunately,
> > without ACID principles, your local email will get corrupted. And most
> > don't want that.
> > Because database technology (embedded or otherwise), use things called
> > 'transactions' it protects the data. If you brew your own 'local storage
> > system' like Evolution, you have what we have now which is unreliable and
> > slow.
> My turn to say "Huh?".
> In what way has Evo "brewed" it's own storage system?  It uses standard
> MBOX files on top of the native filesystem.  That's about as standard as
> it gets.  

I say - "Heh?". ;)  

Because I come down on the other side;  the app might be better off if
they "brewed" their own storage format [like Cyrus IMAP did] and ditched
the "standard" crap [my opinion of both mbox and maildir].  An
application's data should be a sealed container and accessed only via an
API / service

My opinion is: Evolution based its design on well excepted UNIX standards at the time (late nineties). Now, whether that standard is still relevant today may be debatable.

I think an example of a "brewed" storage format is that of Outlook 's opaque mail information store. When a relative experiences a corrupted Outlook file, I just shrug my shoulders as there is little I can do. However with Evolution, because it uses "standard" message stores, I can use tools like "mutt" to fix my MBOX files and recover from various problems.

I also have experienced more problems with Evo's sqllite's index files than I have ever experienced with the MBOX format. Thank goodness the sqllite database only stores information that can be re-constructed from the MBOX files.

I am a database guy. I do a ton of Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres and Mysql work. However even I recognize a database is not a solution for everything.

Cheers,
Rob   

> All the rest of the stuff that Evo uses (like the index files)
> are purely to try and speed up searching and accessing those files.
> There's no doubt that MBOX files can be fragile if you get impatient and
> interrupt a program's access to them while they are being written,
> especially if they are large - that's why Evo provides other file
> formats - based on standards - such as Maildir and MH.
> However, if you really feel that Evo would benefit from using some
> proprietary format backed database for mail, then I'm sure the devs
> would be more than happy to look at any code you submit.

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--
Rob Seward
Bluestone Consulting Group, LLC

web:     http://www.bluestone-consulting.com/
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