Re: [Nmh-workers] [patch] filtering support for inc

[Ken Hornstein]

>Well, I seem to recall that there was documentation :-)  My recollection is
>that there are 3 hooks, add, delete, and refile.  And as I said earlier, they
>could certainly be made more robust.  Maybe it's time to start a discussion.
>>From my perspective, what I need is to know what messages exist by folder and
>message number.  My use case was to have an external database associated with
>the mh database.  What do other people want?

Sigh. I think we're talking past each other.

People asked, "What can we do about message filtering?"

You said, "Hey, check out my hooks support".

My response ... and perhaps I didn't make this very clear ... is that I
do not think the hooks support is suitable at all for message filtering.
By "message filtering" I mean (and I think everyone else means), storing
messages in particular folders based on some criteria.  I am pretty sure
the hooks support CANNOT do that, because there's no way for a hook to tell
the upper level "Please move this message to folder <X>", and I have a
suspicion that if you tried to move a message IN a hook, you'd either get
a deadlock because of sequence file locking, or the various programs that
call hooks would get unhappy.  This is what I was alluding to when I said
there was a lack of documentation; maybe, Jon, in your mind you never
intended anyone to move messages from inside hooks, because that wasn't
your intended usage.

If the goal is to filter messages at "inc" time, then I'd guess that the
best thing to do would be to add a new interface that allowed you to tell
"inc" where you wanted the message to end up.

--Ken