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Author baikie
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Date 2006-12-20.19:17:54
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Yeah, I think that should definitely go in.  ExternalClashError or a
subclass sounds fine to me (although you could make a whole taxonomy
of these errors, really).  It would be good to have the code actually
keep up with other programs' changes, though; a program might just
want to count the messages at first, say, and not make changes until
much later.

I've been trying out the second option (patch attached, to apply on
top of mailbox-copy-back), regenerating _toc on locking, but
preserving existing keys.  The patch allows existing _generate_toc()s
to work unmodified, but means that _toc now holds the entire last
known contents of the mailbox file, with the 'pending' (user-visible)
mailbox state being held in a new attribute, _user_toc, which is a
mapping from keys issued to the program to the keys of _toc
(i.e. sequence numbers in the file).  When _toc is updated, any new
messages that have appeared are given keys in _user_toc that haven't
been issued before, and any messages that have disappeared are removed
from it.  The code basically assumes that messages with the same
sequence number are the same message, though, so even if most cases
are caught by the length check, programs that make
deletions/replacements before locking could still delete the wrong
messages.  This behaviour could be trapped, though, by raising an
exception in lock() if self._pending is set (after all, code like that
would be incorrect unless it could be assumed that the mailbox module
kept hashes of each message or something).

Also attached is a patch to the test case, adding a lock/unlock around
the message count to make sure _toc is up-to-date if the parent
process finishes first; without it, there are still intermittent
failures.

File Added: mailbox-update-toc.diff
History
Date User Action Args
2007-08-23 14:50:01adminlinkissue1599254 messages
2007-08-23 14:50:01admincreate