Hello Adam,

thanks for the reply. Sounds fair enough to me. I hadn't thought about that last benefit of git. I haven't deleted anything off my pc for years ... still got HDD from 15 years ago with 'something' on them ?

Sorry this is going to go off topic somewhat .... (ok, I've just read it again... its gone off topic a lot... again, apologies for that)

One more question, if you are using exclusively LibreOffice, I understand it has a mode where it will separate the file into its constituent flat, text XML files (style, contents, formatting etc), all of which can then be stored in git with all the advantages that privides, no binary files needed. Do you use this functionality ? I haven't done this so I don't know how it impacts the work flow for a user, or how it will integrate into a git workflow, but would be interested to hear a user experience. I just use the inbuilt 'versioning' that is available within libreoffice (much better than multiple copies of the same file with just a few changes).

Hopefully my last set of 'novice questions' ;)

thanks in advance.

David

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 10:41 AM Adam <adam.ranek@seznam.cz> wrote:
Hi David,

Please find answers bellow.

Kind regards,
Adam

---------- Původní e-mail ----------
Od: David Myers <david.myers.24j74@gmail.com>
Komu: Adam <adam.ranek@seznam.cz>, Dovecot Mailing List <dovecot@dovecot.org>
Datum: 7. 10. 2020 8:44:28
Předmět: Re: Version controlled (git) Maildir generated by Dovecot
Hello Adam, and the dovecot list

> Just a question, I hate to pollute the thread, so feel free to push these
> questions into a new thread if deemed necessary. So as you can guess I'm a bit
> of a newb here, so rather obvious questions are about to arrive....
>
> As you are using GIT for your archive (which is a cool idea by the way) I'm
> sure you are well aware that not all files types play nicely with version
> control, my question therefore is : How do you plan to handle attachments ?

I use git for everything including for example LibreOffice / Word documents. Git works just fine with binary files. You can't use text tools like "git diff" but... it works.

> Also, although I appreciate the idea of using git, emails generally don't
> 'change', but I guess that also depends on how you are storing them (single
> email with links to previous / next ... etc, or as a single big file for each
> specific thread). Although this is hitting my limits of understanding for how
> dovecot works, so I probably need educating on this (a pointer to the docs would
> be good).

As I mentioned in the first e-mail, I configured Dovecot to use Maildir format -> each e-mail is a single text file. Mail body + attachment(s) are in the same file, attachment(s) are Base64 encoded.

> You seem concerned regarding the files that you are ignoring that you will need
> to 'recreate them', so why not do a complete git add . prior to adding them into
> the git ignore, then you have an initial state for those files too.

But I don't want to store files that can be regenerated. I don't want to backup stuff, that doesn't have information value.

> Final thought, what advantage do you envisage by using git as opposed to simply
> using a filter to select the files over a certain age, and place them into a
> zipped TAR archive ? Although I guess you could eventually zip the git archive
> too, and in the interim it would remain searchable by your users mail clients
> whilt in git.

I like to use git ;-). Tar will work just fine.

In this use case the only real benefit of git is that it never forgets. Unless I delete whole .git directory, I can make a mistake, delete some e-mails (files), commit changes and rollback. I can't rollback if I delete tar archive.

> Thanks in advance, and apologies once again for polluting your question with my
> own.

David