Thu 2003-02-13 14:35, mark lewis (1:3634/12) wrote to andrew clarke:

 ac> The main benefit of running Squish bases was because they
 ac> could auto-pack themselves.

ml> the bases, themselves, can't but the software (squish) that
ml> manipulates them can...

The format specifically allows for it and the MSGAPI (which most programs
use) provides the support for it.

 ac> I don't think JAM was designed to do this.

ml> sure it can... its just a matter of coding it in the utils... 

Except it's not really practical.  In a JAM base, if the spaced used by a
deleted message were to be reused (autopacking), the program would need to
run through every message header checking if it was marked as deleted, and
then check whether the space used by the deleted message was big enough for
the new message to fit, and if not, keep going.  If it turned out there
were no deleted messages, and you had a message base with 20,000 messages
in it, it could take a while to save just a single message.  Which would be
a big performance hit for a mail tosser importing lots of messages, which
is ideally when you really want autopacking to work.

On the other hand Squish maintains its own "free frame list" (a
linked-list of messages that have been deleted) which is independent to the
"stored list" (a linked-list of stored messages).  A program need
only traverse the free frame list to look for reusable frames, assuming it
honours autopacking.

 ac> You could convert all of these to Squish format using FmaCopy.

ml> and loose access to them from my BBS software and my (current
ml> preferred) mail reader? no thanks...

I wasn't suggesting you should.

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