[Celeste] msgIDs and sharing categories

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Oct 31 04:47:43 UTC 2001


Celeste progress is gridlocked right now.  In no particular order:

Message ID's are pretty reliable.  The RFC says they "should" be
present.  Has anyone 

MD5 is a risky approach, because inserting one random space character
will invalidate the MD5 completely.  MD5's  by design have no notion of
closeness.


Celeste can certainly access message-id's; you just have to read the
message in and then look for the header.  Something like:

        (mailDB getMessage: id) fieldNamed: 'message-id'


The above is currently expensive, but, it could be much faster if the
index file format were updated, so that message-id's could be saved. 
With an improved index file format, I don't think you'd care that
Celeste is using its own message id's.

If the index file is updated, then it also becomes much easier to
implement a "leave messages on server" so that it won't download
messages multiple times.


There have been proposals for updating the index file format, but they
are waiting on Filtering Celeste to settle down.

Filtering Celeste is fairly well settled, but it can't go into the image
until LargeLists does.  If LargeLists doesn't, then FilteringCeleste is
impractical and needs some redesign.

There is dead silence regarding LargeLists, so I'm just a waiting.

Probably, people could actually go ahead and work on the index file
format if they want to, since it's fairly independent from filtering
celeste.  But, this trend cannot go on too long -- eventually we need to
get all our patches together, or Celeste will disintegrate in a mass of
good intentions.

It's not inconceivable that modules will arrive before the next Celeste
patch gets in the main image.  At any rate, whenever Squeak has a good
module system, we'll probably at least *try* to offload Celeste (and
LargeLists, if necessary) into a separate system for a while.


Phew.

-Lex




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