Hey fejj, that poor-man’s version (the proxy technique) is one of the very few possibilities for reducing memory usage when using camel outside of Evolution. As you know is the (current) focus of tinymail to run on mobile devices. Implementing a “poor man’s” solution is IMHO better then depending on a forked and modified camel.
On IRC I did confess (to you, personally, on #gnome-hackers) that vfolders would, indeed, be more difficult to implement in a mail client like tinymail because of the technique. But not impossible (the technique might be useless because, indeed, it needs a reference to the real camelfolder instance for each folder that is used in such a vfolder — but only for such folders).
But believe me that probably a lot people don’t care about those vfolders.
For the mobile-device case: nobody will ask for vfolders on a mobile device if such a feature means paying eight times the price of a typical mobile device because viewing their mail suddenly needs hundreds of megabytes of ram memory.
Perhaps should it be made possible to turn off the vfolder feature in Evolution until Novell decides to finish the disksummary branch? People who aren’t using it, are wasting serious amounts of memory while using Evolution. By the way., I very recently contacted Nat about this disksummary branch. My opinion is that it should be finished. And I’ve already offered my help (in my freetime, I can’t spend my daytime job-hours on it).
But if Novell doesn’t start working on it: I’m not going to do it on my own. So I have to implement what you call “poor-man’s” solutions. It’s the only solution that works, at this moment. If it’s a “poor-man’s” solution, I guess Novell needs to start working on the disksummary branch. Right? (I know some guys of the Evolution team are planning to do that. I’m very interested in that, by the way).
Nevertheless, my prove of concept was that a mail client “can” show large folders without using a lot ram memory using camel. Perhaps I shouldn’t have compared it with Evolution as Evolution does, indeed, have some interesting features that do require memory. But my opinion is that 60 megabytes of ram, is just to much. Way to much. VFolders aren’t a good excuse IMHO.
I’m not the typical asshole that only whines about Evolution. I care about the product and I’m offering my help. But it looks like people are afraid of finishing that disksummary branch.