Re: [Pan-devel] The Blue Sky Becomes Clear - part 01: Basic Thoughts - revision 00

[Charles Kerr]

On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 08:33:44PM +0530, Haran Shivanan wrote:
> Module 'Bas Mevissen' core dumped on Wed, 2 Apr 2003 with the following output
> 
> > * Article database: more fine tuning of the article cache, purging and the 
> How about a new way of storing the cached articles?
> Currently, each article is stored in a separate file, which means the 
> directory is littered with hundreds or thousands of files with each 
> burning a (typically) 4KB inode (for linux installations).
> I know the mbox format was already tried and thrown away but why?
> It would not only be more effecient to store articles in this format, but 
> would make it easier to use from another reader or more appropriately, 
> read articles from an existing mbox. I think the main argument against the 
> mbox format was the cost in parsing the flat file and deleting messages 
> from it. But correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this the format used by 
> many other news readers? (definitely Netscape and possible Mozilla use it)
> I havn't extensively used them but were there any performance problems in 
> using mbox?
> 
> http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html

I don't have time to respond to this properly right now,
but I will point out that jwz's mail summary files statement
is six years old.  I'd counter with this:

http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/

Dan Bernstein of qmail fame wrote a good description of the
mbox problems addressed by maildir, but I can't find the link
right now and have to run to a meeting.