Subject: [sup-talk] GSoC Project of Interest

From: [email-masked] (Jon Dugan)
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:35:00 -0700

There's an GSoC project that may be of interest to folks on this list.  It's
aim is to add Gmail/sup like features to the Plan 9 mail system called upas.

This might end up creating something an awful lot like Sup the Service Not
identical for sure, but there is at least some overlap in terms of aims and
ideas.

Most services on Plan 9 are implemented as synthetic file systems.  The
synthetic filesystem that represents email on Plan 9 is known as upas.  upas
provides a filesytem view of mail boxes regardless of their backend storage
medium (eg, POP, IMAP, etc) which provides a nice clean separation between the
code that you use to do useful things to your mail and the code that deals
with the mail store itself.

To quote the man page:

  The mailbox itself becomes a directory under /mail/fs. Each message in the
  mailbox becomes a numbered directory in the mailbox directory, and each
  attachment becomes a numbered directory in the message directory. Since an
  attachment may itself be a mail message, this structure can recurse ad
  nauseam.

  Each message and attachment directory contains the files:
  body            the message minus the RFC822 style headers
  cc              the address(es) from the CC: header
  date            the date in the message, or if none, the time of delivery
  digest          an SHA1 digest of the message contents
  subject         the contents of the subject line
   .
   . etc
   .

Here's the manpage for upas:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/4/upasfs

The GSoC project:

http://socghop.appspot.com/student_project/show/google/gsoc2009/plan9/t124024225207

There's a ton of interesting and powerful stuff in Plan 9.

I'm hoping this will provide some useful ideas for Sup the Service.

Jon
-- 
Jon M. Dugan <jdugan at es.net>          | GTalk: jdugan.esnet
ESnet Network Engineering Group       | http://www.es.net/
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | http://www.lbl.gov/

---

From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:52:56 -0700

Reformatted excerpts from Jon Dugan's message of 2009-04-22:
> Most services on Plan 9 are implemented as synthetic file systems.
> The synthetic filesystem that represents email on Plan 9 is known as
> upas.  upas provides a filesytem view of mail boxes regardless of
> their backend storage medium (eg, POP, IMAP, etc) which provides a
> nice clean separation between the code that you use to do useful
> things to your mail and the code that deals with the mail store
> itself.

Very interesting and that's a great abstraction. Definitely lots of
overlap with STS. I suspect the primary differences will be that STS
uses fielded, full-text search as its primary access mechanism, and
there's no notion of any kind of filesystem-like mailbox or directory
hierarchy.
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>