Re: [Nmh-workers] MH-W intro/help request

[norm]

Ken Hornstein <address@hidden> writes:
>>Is there any way I can completely avoid the giant folder check?  I
>>can't think of why it is being done time after time for simple program
>>invokations that, for example, refer to a specifically enumerated
>>message.  Obviously *asking* for some relative message list ID like
>>"last" would need to check the directory tofind which message number
>>that is referring to, but it would be easy to do that in one step,
>>always referring to the number after that.
>
>Sigh.  I suspect the original authors of MH simply did not envision
>100K messages in a single folder.  The short answer is, no, you cannot
>avoid it in nmh programs, at least not without a TON of work.

:-)The problem is that do do anything useful with nmh you have to
run the same command thousands of times, each having to do a readdir(). This
is a design flow and an abuse of the operating system. The nmh "commands"
should all be part of the same executable. This elementary design
principle was made very clear to Stock Gaines and to me during several
meetings in 1976. We should have listened more carefully.:-)


    Norman Shapiro