Anders, On Monday 09 August 2004 13:58, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Monday 09 August 2004 22:36, Randall R Schulz wrote:
I use mbox format, not maildir, which strikes me as an insanely bloated way to store email
This statement requires elucidation
mbox and maildir store the exact same information, except that mbox *adds* an additional "From" header to signify envelope sender. So mbox actually stores more data. Assuming you are using a sane file system - like reiserfs for example - that is capable of filling up disk completely and not leave little empty "tails" for half filled blocks, á la ext2/3, it will consume *less* disk space. So how is it bloated?
I may be behind the times as regards Linux / Unix file systems, but I am under the impression that mass storage is allocated with granularities not less than a sector size and almost always a multiple thereof. Under such allocation schemes and a typical allocation unit size of 4096 (eight 512-byte sectors), a message whose entire contents (body, headers and mail client overhead / added headers) were, say, 2000 bytes, then 2096 bytes would be wasted if this message occupied a file of its own. Are you telling me that there are file systems under Linux that eliminate internal fragmentation? If so, all I can say is that I'm impressed. But I also have to wonder what happens under such a scheme when a file is to grow and it ends mid-sector (or mid-allocation unit) and another file shares that sector or allocation unit. It seems that a hell of a lot of shuffling would ensue. Either that or disk allocation occurs at sub-sector granularity. I'm using XFS for my native file systems (and I mount some "legacy" Windows partitions that are NTFS format).
It is also faster and safer (although I seem to recall some problems with storing it on an NFS share), so I don't really see your objection to it. Would you care to explain it a bit further?
It's only as I say above, extremely wasteful of space when disk allocation works in the way I understand it to.
Does the KDE project have a contributed software section?
kdeextragear or kdenonbeta are the CVS modules for non-official kde stuff (meaning stuff not really part of kde but still stored in the kde cvs repository)
Thanks. Randall Schulz