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List: kmail-devel
Subject: Bug#45694: acknowledged by developer (kmail fails to update its folder index properly)
From: Don Sanders <sanders () kde ! org>
Date: 2002-07-30 6:26:12
[Download RAW message or body]
On Tuesday 30 July 2002 08:07, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> Today it's clear that it was a bad design decision to assume that
> KMail is the only program which accesses ~/Mail.
Ingo I strongly disagree.
File locking of ~/Mail is the bad idea and should be discouraged.
There's no standard for the locking mechanism which is dangerous, and
file locking doesn't prevent partially written mails from being
written.
These flaws in ~/Mail locking are why Maildir was developed.
But my main problem with locking of ~/Mail is that it is a
non-scalable design, it makes it impossible to index the mbox files
efficiently. Under the ~/Mail locking design external programs can
not only append to mbox files but modify them randomly, some programs
do so without changing the file date. Thus the only way to handle
mbox files under the ~/Mail locking design is to rescan them
completely.
Scalable mail clients do no support ~/Mail locking. Evolution, Mozilla
and KMail all keep index files and do not support ~/Mail locking.
KMail is able to efficiently handle much larger folders than clients
that depend on ~/Mail locking like pine and mutt.
> This will be fixed
> at some time in the future.
Locking of mbox files in ~/Mail is a fundamentally flawed designed. It
can't be fixed and still allow for efficient handling of large
folders.
KMail can be criticised for keeping mail in ~/Mail and not supporting
file locking since locking of files in ~/Mail used to be something of
a standard. But this criticism is weak as before KMail used ~/KMail
and many users complained asking the KMail developers to use ~/Mail
instead.
Really the problem is with users who mistakenly assume KMail supports
a broken design like ~/Mail locking. Unfortunately such an assumption
might be stupid but it is also human and common. Instead of checking
for reliance on ~/Mail locking (that is checking to see if an
external program modifies mbox files in ~/Mail) and silently trying
to work around this, it would be much better if KMail checked and
gave a strong visual warning to users that ~/Mail locking is not
supported.
Unfortunately we can't do this without upsetting NFS users. Because
NFS is broken by design and triggers our checks for external programs
modifying mbox files.
I think the best thing is to check for mbox files being modifed by
external programs, and show a warning. This warning should indicate
how to turn of mbox checking for NFS users.
Don Sanders
(Complete bug history is available at http://bugs.kde.org/db/45/45694.html)
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