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.