Re: [Nmh-workers] rmmproc Not Used for Lots of Messages; refile Copies.

[Paul Vixie]

On 11/26/2012 9:42 PM, address@hidden wrote:
> Anybody who subscribes to the Linux-kernel list is going to be
> deleting about 700 messages a day. So if you took a 3-day weekend you
> can be looking at 2,000+ messages to delete. exmh has some
> special-case code that does it in chunks of 998 messages at a time. 

using argv[] to carry bulk data is gauche. if mh wants to be hacky it
can do stuff like that. if mh wants to be an example of good engineering
then it has to do something else. what it does ought ideally be portable
to msdos, since some of us run mail clients there. this means that
piping to a subprocess is fine as long as we're not expecting to execute
posix "find" or "xargs". pipes and filters and scripts should be
makeable out of mh but should not necessarily be on the inside of mh.

i'd say that things like rmmproc are fine for singleton messages but
that the caller should never use a longer argv than 10 or 20 elements.
that could mean calling it repeatedly, unless something else (new as of
this thread) like rmmpipe is available, which would take its list of
operands on stdin rather than in argv. folks who want atomicity of rmm
across sequences so that they can put the same timestamp on each message
as they trash it, would have the burden of reworking their scripts to
work as rmmpipe rather than rmmproc.

paul


-- 
"When challenging a Kzin, a simple scream of rage will suffice. You scream and 
you leap."