Coda File System

Re: Coda development roadmap

From: <u-codalist-z149_at_aetey.se>
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2014 08:22:50 +0200
Hello Troy and Piotr,

and thanks for your comments!

On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 06:07:57AM +0200, Piotr Isajew wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 07:10:13PM -0500, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> 
> > Does this message end up in a maildir on a coda filesystem?
> 
> I would be surprised if it did. Coda is a great concept, but in

Yes your messages end up in a maildir on Coda here.

> its current state it has some issues with Maildirs. If I remember

It works good enough for me to prefer this to the possible alternatives.

> well, I had ran into the following issues trying to move my
> maildirs to coda:
> 
> 1. Coda has directory size limit of 4096 entries. So if you have

Actually the limit is not the number of entries but the max size of the
directory, 64k. Depending on the average length of the entries it may
correspond to different number of those. I keep my mailboxes under about
1000 messages each and this leaves me with a large safety margin.

>    bigger Maildir you will have to either split it to smaller
>    ones, or do some source level patching and recompile coda.

Yes, you have to monitor the size of your Maildirs. If you are
on a very active mailing list you may have to automate splitting
of the corresponding mailbox.

> 2. In order for any file stored on coda volume to be visible to
>    file system it needs to be first available in local cache on
>    the client. So (unless you support it by external indexing)
>    opening big Maildir for the first time in your mail client can
>    be an expensive process - as it may require fetching every
>    message from this Maildir to local cache (if it's not already
>    there).

I get a delay when I start mutt on a host with an empty cache but the
delay is about as much burdening as the one when I open an IMAP folder
(forced on me by other parties) of about the same size, by the same
program (not counting the extra effort needed to type the IMAP password :)

> 3. I had also some issues with procmail not supporting delivery
>    to coda hosted Maildirs. The options were to change procmail
>    or use different mail filtering solution. I've chosen the
>    latter.

I am in fact using procmail - yes I think I patched it, it was a while
ago. I had to patch fetchmail too I remember (to collect mail coming
via other mailservers than mine). Once done it is not a problem any longer.

The binaries are on Coda and do not depend on any local libs or similar
so if you use an Intel CPU under Linux (and choose to trust my binaries)
you may get a Coda account and a path to use them directly ;)

Actually my intention is to set up a freely accessible instance
of the software environment we have on Coda, with secure anonymous
tokens of course, but it is a matter of the (hardly) available time.

If you use a non-Intel CPU and/or a non-Linux but unix-ish platform
with Coda, it would be not hard and fun to build an instance for that
platform too (corresponding to ca 2000 such binaries in my PATH).

Rune
Received on 2014-08-01 02:28:34