A simple bug meant that the correct value was being inserted into
the hash table, but a NULL value would be returned in some cases.
(If the value was already in the hash table at the beginning of
the call the the correct value would be returned, but if the
function had to parse to reach it then it would return NULL.)
This was tripping up the recently-added code to ignore messages
with NULL From:, Subject:, and To: headers, (which is fortunate
since otherwise the broken parsing might have stayed hidden for
longer).
This is helpful for things like indexes that other mail programs
may have left around. It also means we can make the initial
instructions much easier, (the user need not worry about moving
away auxiliary files from some other email program).
The line-based parsing can be a bit awkward when wanting to peek
ahead, (say, for folded header values), but it's so convenient
to be able to trust that a string terminator exists on every
line so it cleans up the code considerably.
Looks like we can copy in a hash-table implementation, (from cairo,
say), and then a few _ascii_ functions from glib, (we'll need to
switch a few current uses if things like isspace, etc. to locale-
independent versions as well). So not too hard to free ourselves
of glib for now, (until we add GMime back in later, of course).
Since we're currently just trying to stitch together In-Reply-To
and References headers we don't need that much sophistication.
It's when we later add full-text searching that GMime will be
useful.
So for now, even though my own code here is surely very buggy
compared to GMime it's also a lot faster. And speed is what
we're after for the initial index creation.