On Sat, 3 Nov 2001, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
[snip]
Back on topic: I think I won't switch to Celeste before the file format is not compatible with the standard unix stuff. Maybe there should be various backends? One for the monolithic message file, one for your "each message a separate file", one for "each message folder a file, nested folders are directories (my pref)" - and then, IMAP support would be cool, too :)
One for Minnstore, one for Pointrel, one for MySQL, one for Gemstone, etc. etc...
...and be able to mix and match all o' these...
I really like this (oh, and I'd love to have MailDB refactored a bit, it's actually a pretty damn useful persistency mechanism, if a bit hard to handle at the moment). The question, of course, is how much of the capabilities of the backend do you want to shine through. Using these various stores merely as a replacement for the .messages file should be reasonably straightforward...you just have to alias (or make pluggable) the current msgID assignment & lookup functions. The table of contents list is cached in image (i.e., the indexfile) and the categories are just named lists of msgIDs (one day to be hierarchical...I hope) (although, I think lex may be doing something with categories as named lists of dynamically generated msgIDs, i.e., the results of filtering a la Evolutions virtual folders).
That's one pretty cool thing about Celeste, it's fairly easy to bend to your will, within certain limits.
Cheers, Bijan Parsia.