Previously, the notmuch_messages_t object was a linked list built on
top of a linked-list node with the odd name of notmuch_message_list_t.
Now, we've got much more sane naming with notmuch_message_list_t being
a list built on a linked-list node named notmuch_message_node_t. And
now the public notmuch_messages_t object is a separate iterator based
on notmuch_message_node_t. This means the interfaces for the new
notmuch_message_list_t object are now made available to the library
internals.
The new object is simply a linked-list of notmuch_message_t objects,
(unlike the old object which contained a couple of Xapian iterators).
This works now by the query code immediately iterator over all results
and creating notmuch_message_t objects for them, (rather than waiting
to create the objects until the notmuch_messages_get call as we did
earlier).
The point of this change is to allow other instances of lists of
messages, (such as in notmuch_thread_t), that are not directly related
to Xapian search results.
Previously, an excess call would have caused a crash. Now it simply
does nothing. Also, make notmuch_tags_get use a similar, consistent
early return for a NULL iterator.
We were properly sorting the threads based only on matched messages,
but we were displaying the date based on the total messages in the
thread, which led to inconsistent and very confusing results.
Note that the difference between thread results in date order and
thread results in reverse-date order is not simply a matter of
reversing the final results. When sorting in date order, the threads
are sorted by the oldest message in the thread. When sorting in
reverse-date order, the threads are sorted by the newest message in
the thread.
This difference means that we might want an explicit option in the
interface to reverse the order, (even though the default will be to
display the inbox in date order and global searches in reverse-date
order).
Note that we don't print the number of *unread* messages, but instead
the number of messages that matched the search terms. This is in
keeping with our philosophy that the inbox is nothing more than a
search view. If we search for messages with an inbox tag, then that's
what we'll get a count of. (And if somebody does want to see unread
counts, then they can search for the "unread" tag.)
Getting the number of matched messages is really nice when doing
historical searches. For example in a search like:
notmuch search tag:sent
(where the "sent" tag has been applied to all messages originating
from the user's email address)---here it's really nice to be able to
see a thread where the user just mentioned one point [1/13] vs. really
getting involved in the discussion [10/29].
We add a hash to the thread object so that we can detect author names
that have already been added to the list, and avoid adding them
redundantly. This avoids the giant chain of "bugzilla-daemon,
bugzilla-daemon, bugzilla-daemon, bugzilla-daemon, ..." author lists
that we would get otherwise, for example.
We've now expanded the notmuch_thread_create function to fire off a
secondary database query to find all the messages that belong to this
particular thread. This allows us to now have the complete authors'
list for the thread, and will also make it trivial to print accurate
message counts for threads in the future.
I thought it would be safe enough to return a few extra threads,
(since we happened to already get the relevant messages out of the
database). The problem is that then requires the caller to carefully
read the number of threads returned and adjust its next "first" value
accordingly. The interface is much simpler to use if we simply return
exactly what is asked for and no more.
This serves me right for committing untested code. The
notmuch_query_search_threads was totally broken, (it didn't properly
treat -1 as being unlimited and instead returned no threads in that
case).
The library interface now allows the caller to do incremental searches,
(such as one page of results at a time). Next we'll just need to hook
this up to "notmuch search" and the emacs interface.
It's important to have the names present for determining whether a
thread is worth reading or not. We may want to think about
abbreviating the list somehow if it is excessively long (or redundant
as in bugzilla-daemon, bugzilla-daemon, bugzilla-daemon, etc.).
We never did export any interface to get at these, and when I went to
use these, I found them inadequate, (because I wanted to distinguish
address found in from: from those found in To:). Meanwhile, it was
easy enough to extract addresses with a search like:
notmuch show tag:sent | grep ^To:
so the storage of contact terms was just wasting space. Stop that.
This will allow for things like the database path to be specified
without any cheesy NOTMUCH_BASE environment variable. It also will
allow "notmuch reply" to recognize the user's email address when
constructing a reply in order to do the right thing, (that is, to use
the user's address to which mail was sent as From:, and not to reply
to the user's own addresses).
With this change, the "notmuch setup" command is now strictly for
changing the configuration of notmuch. It no longer creates the
database, but instead instructs the user to call "notmuch new" to do
that.
Previously, the top-level Makefile was explicitly adding -I./lib to
the compiler flags. However, that's something that's much better done
from within the Makefile.local fragment within the lib directory
itself.
I saw this recommendation in the implementation notes for "Recursive
Make Considered Harmful" and then the further recommendation for
implementing the idea in the GNU make manual.
The idea is that if any of the files change then we need to regenerate
the dependency file before we regenerate any targets.
The approach from the GNU make manual is simpler in that it just uses
a sed script to fix up the output of an extra invocation of the
compiler, (as opposed to the approach in the implementation notes from
the paper's author which use a wrapper script for the compiler that's
always invoked rather than the compiler itself).
The idea here is that every Makefile at each lower level will be an
identical, tiny file that simply defers to a top-level make.
Meanwhile, the Makefile.local file at each level is a Makefile snippet
to be included at the top-level into a large, flat Makefile. As such,
it needs to define its rules with the entire relative directory to
each file, (typically in $(dir)). The local files can also append to
variables such as SRCS and CLEAN for files to be analyzed for
dependencies and to be cleaned.
