This is what most people want for a _search_ command. It's often
different for actually reading mail in an inbox, (where it makes more
sense to have results displayed in chronological order), but in such a
case, ther user is likely using an interface that can simply pass the
--sort=oldest-first option to "notmuch search".
Here we're also change the sort enum from NOTMUCH_SORT_DATE and
NOTMUCH_SORT_DATE_REVERSE to NOTMUCH_SORT_OLDEST_FIRST and
NOTMUCH_SORT_NEWEST_FIRST. Similarly we replace the --reverse option
to "notmuch search" with two options: --sort=oldest-first and
--sort=newest-first.
Finally, these changes are all tracked in the emacs interface, (which
has no change in its behavior).
We now properly analyze the in-reply-to headers to create a proper
tree representing the actual thread and present the messages in this
correct thread order. Also, there's a new "depth:" value added to the
"message{" header so that clients can format the thread as desired,
(such as by indenting replies).
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].
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.).
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.
