142604 - mailing lists format on disk is very inneficient

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Address Book & Contacts, defect)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mailing lists are done in a very inneficient way.

From bienvenu:

"the way to do them would just to have one cell that's the ids of all the rows
in the list, instead of having a separate column, address1, address2, etc.

what I'd do is have a column that's all the row ids of the list members, as a string

to upgrade, you'd just check for that column in any given mailing list
and if it didn't exist, create it by iterating over the other columns (address1,
address2, etc), and then removing the other columns

then, when displaying address lists, you'd need to read in that column, and
parse out the numbers of the list member rows

it would be more code so it might be worthwhile to see what the space savings
would be."

Comment 1

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Mmmm, normalizing.  Another advantage to this proposal is that if you edit
somebody's card and change their email address, and lists which contain them are
automagically kept in sync. So there may be some code savings there.

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

actually, I think each column in the list is actually the row id of the
corresonding card, so we'd still be writing out the same info (the row id's) but
just in a more compact form.

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

This will be WONTFIX:

1. This would break forwards-compatability, which means upgrade + downgrade is lossy.
2. There isn't much of a compelling reason for changing this; if it actually breaks being able to do something with mailing lists, then the bug would probably include this change as a result.
3. We're planning on ripping out mork once bug 413260 is finished anyways (probably 3.next), so this would be a moot point anyways in the mid-term.