Re: [Nmh-workers] Large MH directories

[Ken Hornstein]

>wouldn't that make us pretty much like the GNU MH-like thing that's
>already in existence? (should we parrot any of their API's, in hopes of
>creating a future generation of portable shell-level e-mail toolery?)

Well ... sort of?  AFAICT, the MH part of mailutils was implemented to
make MH-E work.  From their documentation:

  The primary aim of this implementation is to provide an interface
  between Mailutils and Emacs using mh-e module.

We've kind of gone our own way.  And I have looked at their API; it's
... harsh?  That may be unfair; I didn't dig deeply into it, and maybe
it's unavoidable to be that way.  I guess my point is that it does a
lot of things, but my interpretation is that it's not so focused on
providing a set of MH-like shell tools.

I know you know this already, Paul; I'm only repeating it for the
benefit of others.  The Big Problem with a nmh IMAP backend is how to
map nmh message numbers (which are persistent, can have gaps) to IMAP
messages (which are either identified by a non-permament message number
which ranges from 1-N without gaps or by UID, which is permament).
AFAIK, Mailutils has not solved that problem.  Maybe I'm wrong!  If so,
I welcome a correction.  But I don't think that's their goal.  So
I think if you want something like nmh, but on IMAP folders, then
we have to do it.

--Ken