mail/mutt problems with sidebar patch

[Alex Stangl]

Hi,

I emailed the mail/mutt maintainer a month ago and got no response,
so I'm trying this list instead.

After a pkg upgrade on my FreeBSD 9.1 system, mutt became so slow as to
be almost unusable. When I would first come into mutt, it would stick at
the "Sorting mailbox..." message, which formerly would always display so
quickly I wouldn't even notice it. After the message index would finally
display, each keystroke to navigate through the messages would take on
the order of several seconds to process.

After experimentation, attempted reinstalls, looking at the mutt source,
etc., I determined that the sidebar patch appears to be the culprit.
I keep large quantities of mail, and the sidebar patch must be trying
to process the mail folders with every keystroke.

Reinstalling mutt from the port, with sidebar patch disabled restored
its previous snappy performance. I'm not sure how the issue with
building binary packages, versus having large number of options ever
played out. The binary package I got, at least, included the sidebar
patch, even though I was previously building the port without it.

I can use the pkg lock functionality to keep pkg from updating mutt, but
am wondering if there is a better long-term fix, and what the general
direction is for selecting options for the binary pkg builds, some of
which may cause some users big problems (as in my case). I suppose I
could clear out all my mail files, archiving their contents elsewhere,
but it would be a shame to be forced to do that because of inclusion of
a patch for a feature I don't even plan to use.

I found a sidebar-related option that someone added, to address this
exact problem, however it does not appear that the FreeBSD sidebar
patch incorporates this.

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/mutt-kz/2012-May/000065.html

I think if this $sidebar_refresh option is added, it provides a way out,
to be able to have the sidebar patch included by default, while allowing
mutt users with large mbox files to still be happy. Of course, this
option should preferably be published somewhere prominent, so mutt users
in a similar predicament can manage to find the fix w/o so much digging.

Comments? Anybody else experiencing performance problems with the
sidebar patch? Maybe I'll submit a patch to add the $sidebar_refresh
option.

Thanks,

Alex