TODO: More notes on archive-thread and race conditions.

Interstingly, it's our simple "notmuch" client that's going to be the
most difficult to fix. There's just not as much information preserved
in the textual representation from "notmuch search" as there is in the
objects returned from notmuch_query_search_threads.
This commit is contained in:
Carl Worth 2009-10-27 10:19:46 -07:00
parent c690420076
commit f2bcc256fb

31
TODO
View file

@ -15,11 +15,26 @@ Think about this race condition:
Client asks for the thread to be archived.
The bug here is that email that was never read will be
archived. That's bad. With the command set above, the user can
avoid the problem by just not running "notmuch new" while reading
mail, but the same problems exists with the API. One possible
solution would be to store an additional timestamp with each mail
document for the time it was added to the database. Then searches
could return a timestamp, and the client could pass that same
timestamp back to the archive command to not modify any messages
with a timestamp newer than what's passed.
archived. That's bad. The fix for the above is for the client to
archive the individual messages already retrieved and shown, not
the thread. (And in fact, we don't even have functions for removing
tags on threads.)
But this one is harder to fix:
A client executes "notmuch search"
While user is reading, new mail is added to database for the thread
Client asks for a thread to be archived.
To support this operation, (archiving a thread without even seeing
the individual messages), we might need to provide a command to
archive a thread as a whole. The problem is actually easy to fix
for a persistent client. It can onto the originally retrieved
thread objects which can hold onto the originally retrieved
messages. So archiving those thread objects, (and not newly created
thread objects), will be safe.
It's harder to fix the non-persistent "notmuch" client. One
approach is to simply tell the user to not run "notmuch new"
between reading the results of "notmuch search" and executing
"notmuch archive-thread" (or whatever we name it).