add feature request: Lay foundation for non-Maildir message stores

Changing the API to make this possible requires extensive knowledge of notmuch
internals. After fixing the API the changes necessary to support different
message stores should be mostly self-contained and much easier for an
"outsider" to implement.

diff --git a/feature-requests.mdwn b/feature-requests.mdwn
index 4352ceb052838ba4519e8842bd025f84374ac39e..b8f70ed440a5432f1dad3d7c5f5a21dd2538919d 100644 (file)
--- a/feature-requests.mdwn
+++ b/feature-requests.mdwn
@@ -80,6 +80,19 @@
      server-side filtering can be directly used by notmuch to tag all
      incoming mail.
 
++    Make message store code modular
+
+     Notmuch is built on the assumption that the message store is a
+     collection of message files in directories (roughly Maildir
+     format). This performs suboptimally for a wide range of systems,
+     especially with large numbers of messages. Modularising the
+     message store code to move this assumption into the implementation
+     rather than the interface would allow adding support for different
+     message stores like the traditional [mbox
+     formats](http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/mail-mbox-formats.html)
+     as well as more experimental approaches like using git as an object
+     storage (similar to how [[nmbug]] operates).
+
 ## 3rd party apps
 
 ### notmuchsync