X-Status flag, reconstruct and a suggestion

[Diego Rivera]

On Sat, 2003-10-04 at 09:37, Rob Siemborski wrote:
> I think I meant that "if you write it, I'll look at it and strongly
> consider including it."  Not "I'll write that."

Oh ok...my mistake :)  I'll get cracking then...

> Unlike the reconstruct patch, which is helpful for migration, I don't
> think we would ever take something that modified the contents of message
> files.

I figured as much, but I thought I'd ask anyway :)

How about adding a second text file a-la "34.status" which ONLY contains
the X-Status flag?  If the file exists, reconstruct could leverage it...

My line of thinking is this: if a catastrophe prevents me from using the
DBs, or the DBs are partially corrupted for a group of users who also
happen to have a lot of e-mail, the X-Status information lets me restore
the entirety of the mailbox status info as it was before the failure,
rather than have all the statuses reset due to the failure.

This "status file" approach would certainly incurr less of a penalty
performance-wise, as the contents of the file will tend to be small, and
there won't be a need for editing the contents.  Replacing them
completely every time there's a change in status could be enough.

Plus, it could be a boolean option - paranoid sites might be willing to
take the performance hit in exchange for the added failure-tolerance.

Thus, no message modification is necessary, and performance wouldn't be
impacted negatively if the option wasn't active.  As a side note to
that, how bad you estimate the hit would be for writing (and
over-writing) such a small file when status changes?

Note that I'm thinking of ALWAYS replacing the contents of the status
file, rather than trying to edit it.  Also, in case the file is lost for
a particular message it's no big deal that THAT particular message's
status gets reset, but it helps in keeping the bulk of the mailbox's
statuses available for a good recovery - which would be the goal.

Best


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