[Alpine-info] bug reports

[Mike Miller]

On Tue, 6 May 2008, Mark Crispin wrote:


> Give mix a try.  Caveat: you can't use it over NFS.


What is the MIX format?  Is there a description of it somewhere?  Why 
doesn't it work with NFS?

I think MIX was developed at your shop -- U Washington, at least -- so you 
might be a bit biased.  ;-)  Why is it better than MH or Maildir?



> I suspect that you'll find that there is nearly a two orders of 

> magnitude speedup compared to traditional UNIX format in open times for 

> godzilla mailboxes.  This is due to the index.


The same would be true for any system that stores mail in small files -- 
one file per message instead of in giant files like mbox.  No one in his 
right mind would even think of mbox if he were designing an email storage 
system in today's world.



> Like mbx (the 1995 vintage alternative mailbox format), mix uses CR/LF 

> format text, there is none of the CPU/memory-sapping newline conversion 

> cost.


How does that work?  I know that unix uses LF only (often called NL for 
newline) and that DOS/Windows uses CR/LF, but I never looked at how email 
works with these characters.  Are you saying that email messages use CR/LF 
but they are stored in mbox files as LF only, so they have to be converted 
when a message is retrieved?  My first guess is that (if I am 
understanding), the LF -> CR/LF conversion is extremely fast and not a big 
problem and I'd rather have my email stored as unix text if possible.

Mike