Re: Filename guarantees

[Earl Hood <ehood@hydra.acs.uci.edu>]

On January 17, 2002 at 15:14, Eugene Eric Kim wrote:

> What filesystems do not support the characters appearing in valid message
> IDs?

Windows and VMS.  Since message-ids are used for annotations, I
get around this problem by encoding the message-id in quoted-printable
format.  However, for VMS, there are filename length limitations, which
most message-ids easily exceed.  I think I will not bother with
trying to deal with filename length issues since the user base is
very small for such systems.

The quoted-printable trick should be sufficient for special character
issues, but it does add a little overhead.


> As a temporary measure, you could use a CGI program that took the message
> ID as a parameter, and retrieved the appropriate filename using the
> information from .mhonarc.db.  That would resolve the problem of invalid
> filenames by giving you a persistent method for retrieving messages
> independent of the filename.

This is inefficient, but will work.  A more efficient approach is
to use a db, or dbm, file that maps message-ids to pathnames.  It is
possible to hook such a thing in with the new callback functions
added in v2.5.  Perl has modules for interfacing with various db file
types.

--ewh