notmuch-{dump,restore}.1: document new format options

More or less arbitrarily, notmuch-dump.1 gets the more detailed
description of the format.
This commit is contained in:
David Bremner 2012-01-02 15:07:33 -04:00
parent 0f066ece0f
commit 60cd3b9a06
2 changed files with 112 additions and 6 deletions

View file

@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ notmuch-dump \- creates a plain-text dump of the tags of each message
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B "notmuch dump"
.RB [ "\-\-format=(sup|batch-tag)" "] [--]"
.RI "[ --output=<" filename "> ] [--]"
.RI "[ <" search-term ">...]"
@ -19,6 +20,64 @@ recreated from the messages themselves. The output of notmuch dump is
therefore the only critical thing to backup (and much more friendly to
incremental backup than the native database files.)
.TP 4
.B \-\-format=(sup|batch-tag)
Notmuch restore supports two plain text dump formats, both with one message-id
per line, followed by a list of tags.
.RS 4
.TP 4
.B sup
The
.B sup
dump file format is specifically chosen to be
compatible with the format of files produced by sup-dump.
So if you've previously been using sup for mail, then the
.B "notmuch restore"
command provides you a way to import all of your tags (or labels as
sup calls them).
Each line has the following form
.RS 4
.RI < message-id >
.B (
.RI < tag "> ..."
.B )
with zero or more tags are separated by spaces. Note that (malformed)
message-ids may contain arbitrary non-null characters. Note also
that tags with spaces will not be correctly restored with this format.
.RE
.RE
.RS 4
.TP 4
.B batch-tag
The
.B batch-tag
dump format is intended to more robust against malformed message-ids
and tags containing whitespace or non-\fBascii\fR(7) characters.
Each line has the form
.RS 4
.RI "+<" "encoded-tag" "> " "" "+<" "encoded-tag" "> ... -- " "" " id:<" encoded-message-id >
where encoded means that every byte not matching the regex
.B [A-Za-z0-9@=.,_+-]
is replace by
.B %nn
where nn is the two digit hex encoding.
The astute reader will notice this is a special case of the batch input
format for \fBnotmuch-tag\fR(1); note that the single message-id query is
mandatory for \fBnotmuch-restore\fR(1).
.RE
With no search terms, a dump of all messages in the database will be
generated. A "--" argument instructs notmuch that the
remaining arguments are search terms.

View file

@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ notmuch-restore \- restores the tags from the given file (see notmuch dump)
.B "notmuch restore"
.RB [ "--accumulate" ]
.RB [ "--format=(auto|batch-tag|sup)" ]
.RI "[ --input=<" filename "> ]"
.SH DESCRIPTION
@ -15,19 +16,51 @@ Restores the tags from the given file (see
The input is read from the given filename, if any, or from stdin.
Note: The dump file format is specifically chosen to be
Supported options for
.B restore
include
.RS 4
.TP 4
.B \-\-accumulate
The union of the existing and new tags is applied, instead of
replacing each message's tags as they are read in from the dump file.
.RE
.RS 4
.TP 4
.B \-\-format=(sup|batch-tag|auto)
Notmuch restore supports two plain text dump formats, with each line
specifying a message-id and a set of tags.
For details of the actual formats, see \fBnotmuch-dump\fR(1).
.RS 4
.TP 4
.B sup
The
.B sup
dump file format is specifically chosen to be
compatible with the format of files produced by sup-dump.
So if you've previously been using sup for mail, then the
.B "notmuch restore"
command provides you a way to import all of your tags (or labels as
sup calls them).
The --accumulate switch causes the union of the existing and new tags to be
applied, instead of replacing each message's tags as they are read in from the
dump file.
.RE
.RS 4
.TP 4
.B batch-tag
See \fBnotmuch-search-terms\fR(7)
for details of the supported syntax for <search-terms>.
The
.B batch-tag
dump format is intended to more robust against malformed message-ids
and tags containing whitespace or non-\fBascii\fR(7) characters. This
format hex-escapes all characters those outside of a small character
set, intended to be suitable for e.g. pathnames in most UNIX-like
systems.
.B "notmuch restore"
updates the maildir flags according to tag changes if the
@ -36,6 +69,20 @@ configuration option is enabled. See \fBnotmuch-config\fR(1) for
details.
.RE
.RS 4
.TP 4
.B auto
This option (the default) tries to guess the format from the
input. For correctly formed input in either supported format, this
heuristic, based the fact that batch-tag format contains no parentheses,
should be accurate.
.RE
.RE
.SH SEE ALSO
\fBnotmuch\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-config\fR(1), \fBnotmuch-count\fR(1),