This is (almost) the same script as has been used for
http://nmbug.tethera.net/status for a while now. The only change is
that the configuration is not hardcoded anymore. By default the config
is fetched from a special branch in the nmbug repo that contains only
config info. The idea is that push access to this branch can be
restricted a bit more than the tags, since it will change the
appearence of the web pages.
If any of the forked process exits with nonzero value, terminate
current operation -- nonzero exit value indicates failure and
then there is no point continuing.
The main idea is consider the notmuch database as analogous to the
work-tree. A bare git repo is maintained in the users home directory,
with a tree of the form tags/$message-id/$tag
Like notmuch and git, we have a set of subcommnds, mainly modelled on
git.
Implementation wise, the heavy lifting is in the following functions.
commit xapian -> git
checkout git -> xapian
merge fetched git + git -> xapian
status find differences between xapian, git, and remote git.
The central implementation trick, from an idea I think due to
tomprince on IRC is manipulate the git index directly from the xapian
tag information. The merge routine is still done using a temporary
checkout as I wasn't able to get it working with the index only.
There are also some convenience wrappers around git commands, like "fetch"
that essential just set GIT_DIR in the environment.
In order to encode tags (viewed as octet sequences) into filenames,
we whitelist a smallish set of characters and %hex escape anything outside.
The prefix is omitted in git, which lets one save and restore to
different prefixes (although this is only lightly tested).
Thanks to Tomi Ollila for a huge amount of feedback and patches while
putting this together.
