vm team mailing list archive

[Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Manuel,

Thanks for your thoughtful response.  Indeed, VM support became
inactive at a time when critical coding changes happened in the
Emacs world.  It was probably an annoying experience.  But it seems
that we have managed turn things around now.  So, if you ever get
unhappy with Gnus, you are welcome to come back.

The slowness problem continues to exist.  But I think that, with the
developments in computer hardware, it is less critical now.  I have
upgraded my hardware to Core 2 Duo in the summer (two generations
behind the latest), and I am quite happy with the speed of VM on it.
(My mailbox size hovers around 2000 messages.)  I also installed a
Solid State Drive for secondary storage, which speeds up the reading
and writing of mailboxes by a factor of 5 or so.

VM wasn't based on remote storage for messages.  But we will think of
some improvements that can reduce the size of the resident image.

Cheers,
Uday

Manuel Carro writes:

> 
> > Ok, thanks for letting us know.  
> > 
> > Since you have now used both VM and Gnus extensively, perhaps you can
> > give us some idea of the pros and cons of the two?
> 
> The biggest cons of VM was that it started to be brittle and needed
> manual repairing of mailboxes.  This may certainly be caused by
> ill-formed messages which VM was not shielded against.  A minor problem
> was that it was a bit slow with large (say, 1000 messages onwards)
> mailboxes.  This could be alleviated by making it work with a back-end
> based on the maildir format (which effectively increases disk usage, but
> which also speeds up syncronization using e.g. Unison).  Otherwise I was
> quite happy with VM.
> 
> GNUs is much more complex.  It has around 600 user-callable functions.
> Its idea is that actual Usenet news, RSS feeds, mail (either read
> remotely through IMAP or dowloaded to the local disk in a variety of
> formats) has the same interface based on classifying things in groups
> (it can be a single, huge group).  This needs a mind change, and, to
> this date, I still wonder whether I have received or not a given
> message.  But it is bullet-proof and very powerful; however, configuring
> it is not really straightforward or easy to understand.  And changing a
> configuration which works can, in my experience, lead to strange
> phenomena.  However, erasing a message difficult enough to make sure
> that they will not be erased by mistake.
> 
> My recommendation would be: if someone is happy with VM, trying GNUs is
> probably not worth the effort.  For people who are really really
> mail-driven and are not aware of configuring a complex package in Emacs
> Lisp, it may be something to try out.
>