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

[Rob]

On Thursday 03 April 2003 17:50, Duncan wrote:
> I'd argue that your statement about Linux is incorrect.  This isn't
> MSWormOS. We aren't stuck with some limited choice of proprietary fs
> formats.  There are all sorts of fs formats to meet all sorts of different
> needs.  In this case, ReiserFS is a perfect choice, since it deals with

That's great for a single user sitting at the console and running as 
effectively root, but This isn't MSWormOS (tm)   Normal users on Linux 
typically don't get to mount their filesystems of choice, even as loopback.

Yes, ext2/ext3 bogs down when you start getting a lot of inodes in one 
directory.  Not as bad as the FAT variants but still pretty poor.  
Nonetheless, it tends to be the "standard" and Pan is the sort of application 
that appeals to users who aren't going to know enough (or even know how) to 
reformat a partition with someone's pet filesystem, or even how to set up a 
loopback file.

If enough people's performance is degraded because Pan stores its data in a 
way that won't perform well on typical desktop installations, and if its 
developers took your approach and said "j00 sux0rz, r31z0r r0x0rz" the 
community's impression of Pan wouldn't become "Pan rocks, but I'm using a 
crappy filesystem".  It would be "Pan is slow, its developers know it and 
they don't want to do anything to fix it."

For my part, I was unaware that Pan stored cached articles individually; this 
gives me hope that I'll be able to hack "Keep this article forever" 
functionality into Pan somehow, maybe the last remaining desirable feature 
from Agent that Pan's never had.  (Pan used to have Launch Attachments and 
that's currently MIA, but that's also easier to fix for us KDE users by 
sticking "kfmclient exec" in there. ;) )

Rob