Xapian provides an interator-based interface to all search results.
So it was natural to make notmuch_messages_t be iterator-based as
well. Which we did originally.
But we ran into a problem when we added two APIs, (_get_replies and
_get_toplevel_messages), that want to return a messages iterator
that's *not* based on a Xapian search result. My original compromise
was to use notmuch_message_list_t as the basis for all returned
messages iterators in the public interface.
This had the problem of introducing extra latency at the beginning
of a search for messages, (the call would block while iterating over
all results from Xapian, converting to a message list).
In this commit, we remove that initial conversion and instead provide
two alternate implementations of notmuch_messages_t (one on top of a
Xapian iterator and one on top of a message list).
With this change, I tested a "notmuch search" returning *many* results
as previously taking about 7 seconds before results started appearing,
and now taking only 2 seconds.
We only rarely need to actually open the database for writing, but we
always create a Xapian::WritableDatabase. This has the effect of
preventing searches and like whilst updating the index.
Signed-off-by: Chris Wilson <chris@chris-wilson.co.uk>
Acked-by: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>
We had exposed this to the internal implementation for a short time,
(only while we had the silly code fetching In-Reply-To values from
message files instead of from the database). Make this private again
as it should be.
The message file header parsing code parses only enough of the file to
find the desired header fields, then it leaves the file open until the
next header parsing call or when the message is no longer in use. If a
large number of messages end up being active, this will quickly run
out of file descriptors.
Here, we add support to explicitly close the message file within a
message, (_notmuch_message_close) and call that from thread
construction code.
Signed-off-by: Keith Packard <keithp@keithp.com>
Edited-by: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>:
Many portions of Keith's original patch have since been solved other
ways, (such as the code that changed the handling of the In-Reply-To
header). So the final version is clean enough that I think even Keith
would be happy to have his name on it.
This function has only one caller, and that one caller was passing the
same value for both talloc_owner and the notmuch database. Dropping
the redundant argument simplifies the documentation of this function
considerably.
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).
The existing notmuch_message_get_header is *almost* good enough for
this, except that we also need to remove the '<' and '>'
delimiters. We'll probably want to implement this function with
database storage in the future rather than loading the email message.
This prototype has been sitting around for a while with no function
implementing it. I wonder if there's a compiler warning I could turn
on to catch these things.
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.
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'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.
