rolling Firefox back to 2.x

Steve Lamb grey at dmiyu.org
Thu Sep 4 17:25:52 UTC 2008


On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 10:46:03AM -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Steve Lamb wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 05:13:19PM -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> >> I'm actually a bit surprised that many systems still use mbox.
 
> >     I'm not.
 
> Well given that it's an open call for corrupted mail messages, and maildir
> is so much safer, yeah, I am.

    Had this discussion several times on D-U so lemme summarize.  I've had
more hard drive failures in the past 2 or so decades of mbox usage than I have
had of corrupted mail messages.  As in, 2 hard drive failures in 2 decades to
0 mbox corruptions in the same timeframe.  Maildir is no more resilient to
physical failure than mbox is.  The answer for both is the same; a backup
which is on a different physical device.

    However, in the same 2 decades almost every time I've had to deal with
large volumes of mail stored in Maildir it has been an absolute nightmare
because of the excessive amount of stat calls to do anything with those files.

    In short I have lost more time to Maildir because of its design than I
ever have to mbox because of its design.

    I agree, in theory, it is superior.  Just as message-passing
micro kernels are, in theory, superior.  Until they were put into
practice and the overheard of the message-passing mechanisms of the time
provided a significant decay on performance.
-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
       PGP Key: 1FC01004       | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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