notmuch/TODO

Fix the things that are causing the most pain to new users
----------------------------------------------------------
1. A new import is tagging all messages as "inbox" -- total pain

2. Allow an easy way to get tags from directory names (if the user has them)

3. Make emacs fast for big search results (see "lazy searching" below)

4. Fix Xapian defect #250 so tagging is fast.

Emacs interface (notmuch.el)
----------------------------
Make the keybindings help ('?') display the summary of each command's
documentation, not the function name.

Add a global keybinding table for notmuch, and then view-specific
tables that add to it.

Add a command to archive all threads in a search view.

Lazy searching: call "notmuch search" with --first and --max to fill
just a screenful of results, and then fill in more as ther user pages
through the buffer.

Add a '|' binding from the search view.

Add a binding to run a search from notmuch-show-mode.

When a thread has been entirely read, start out by closing all
messages except those that matched the search terms.

Add support for choosing from one of the user's configured email
addresses for the From line.

Make 'notmuch-show-pipe-message have a private history.

Add support for a delete keybinding that adds a "deleted" tag to the
current message/thread and make searches not return deleted messages
by default, (unless the user asks explicitly for deleted messags in
the search query).

Add support to "mute" a thread (add a "muted" tag and then don't
display threads in searches by default where any message of the thread
has the "muted" tag).

Portability
-----------
Fix configure script to test each compiler warning we want to use.

Implement strndup locally (or call talloc_strndup instead).

Implement getline locally, (look at gnulib).

Completion
----------
Fix bash completion to complete multiple search options (both --first
and *then* --max-threads), and also complete value for --sort=
(oldest-first or newest-first).

notmuch command-line tool
-------------------------
Teach "notmuch search" to return many different kinds of results. Some
ideas:

	notmuch search --for threads	# Default if no --for is given
	notmuch search --for messages
	notmuch search --for tags
	notmuch search --for addresses
	notmuch search --for terms

Add a "--format" option to "notmuch search", (something printf-like
for selecting what gets printed).

Add a "--count-only" (or so?) option to "notmuch search" for returning
the count of search results.

Give "notmuch restore" some progress indicator. Until we get the
Xapian bugs fixed that are making this operation slow, we really need
to let the user know that things are still moving.

Add a "-f <filename>" option to select an alternate configuration
file.

Fix notmuch.c to call add_timestamp/get_timestamp with path names
relative to the database path. (Otherwise, moving the database to a
new directory will result in notmuch creating new timestamp documents
and leaving stale ones behind.)

Ensure that "notmuch new" is sane if its first, giant indexing session
gets interrupted, (that is, ensure that any results indexed so far are
flushed).

Fix notmuch.c to use a DIR prefix for directory timestamps, (the idea
being that it can then add other non-directory timestamps such as for
noting how far back in the past mail has been indexed, and whether it
needs to re-tag messages based on a theoretical "auto-tags"
configuration file).

Make "notmuch new" notice when a mail directory has gone more than a
month without receiving new mail and use that to trigger the printing
of the note that the user might want to mark the directory read-only.

Also make "notmuch new" optionally able to just mark those month-old
directories read-only on its own. (Could conflict with low-volume
lists such as announce lists if they are setup to deliver to their own
maildirs.)

Allow configuration for filename patterns that should be ignored when
indexing.

notmuch library
---------------
Provide a sane syntax for date ranges. First, we don't want to require
both endpoints to be specified. For example it would be nice to be
able to say things like "since:2009-01-1" or "until:2009-01-1" and
have the other enpoint be implicit. Second we'de like to support
relative specifications of time such as "since:'2 months ago'". To do
any of this we're probably going to need to break down an write our
own parser for the query string rather than using Xapian's QueryParser
class.

Add support for files that are moved or deleted (which obviously need
to be handled differently).

Actually compile and install a libnotmuch shared library.

Fix to use the *last* Message-ID header if multiple such headers are
encountered, (I noticed this is one thing that kept me from seeing the
same message-ID values as sup).

Add support for the user to specify custom headers to be indexed.

Add support for configuring "virtual tags" which are a tuple of
(tag-name, search-specification). The database is responsible for
ensuring that the virtual tag is always consistent.

Think about optimizing chunked searches (max-threads > 0) to avoid
repeating work. That would be saving state from the previous chunk and
reusing it if the next search is the next chunk with the same search
string.

General
-------
Audit everything for dealing with out-of-memory (and drop xutil.c).

Write a test suite.

Achieve 100% test coverage with the test suite.

Investigate why the notmuch database is slightly larger than the sup
database for the same corpus of email.

Xapian
------
Fix defect #250

	replace_document should make minimal changes to database file
	http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/250

	It looks like it's going to be easy to fix. Here's the file to
	change:

		xapian-core/backends/flint/flint_database.cc

	And look for:

	  // FIXME - in the case where there is overlap between the new
	  // termlist and the old termlist, it would be better to compare the
	  // two lists, and make the minimum set of modifications required.
	  // This would lead to smaller changesets for replication, and
	  // probably be faster overall

	So I think this might be as easy as just walking over two
	sorted lists looking for differences.

	Note that this is in the currently default "flint" backend,
	but the Xapian folks are probably more interested in fixing
	the in-development "chert" backend. So the patch to get
	upstreamed there will probably also fix:

		xapian-core/backends/chert/chert_database.cc

	(I'm hoping the fix will be the same---an identical comment
	exists there.)

	Also, if you want to experiment with the chert backend,
	compile current Xapian source and run notmuch with
	XAPIAN_PREFER_CHERT=1. I haven't tried that yet, but there are
	claims that a chert database can be 40% smaller than an
	equivalent flint database.

Report this bug:

	"tag:foo and tag:bar and -tag:deleted" goes insane

	This seems to be triggered by a Boolean operator next to a
	token starting with a non-word character---suddenly all the
	Boolean operators get treated as literal tokens)