There's been a lot of good work done, and we've been doing a generally
poor job of noticing when some of the tasks we've completed were
already on our TODO list.
So here's a careful scan, removing all items I could find that have
already been done.
We've been using --output in IRC and on the mailing list for a while,
(someone had the good sense to point out that --for would defeat
command-line completion since it's a prefix of the proposed --format).
Similar to the way thread-viewing was broken after a thread was
archived, (and recently fixed), tag manipulation has also been broken
when the thread no longer matches the current search.
This also means that the behavior of '+' and '-' are now different
than that of '*'. The '+' and '-' bindings now return to the previous
behavior old affecting all messages in the thread, (and not simply
those matching the search).
I actually prefer this behavior, since otherwise a '-' operation on a
thread might not actually remove the tag from the thread, (since it
could operate on a subset of the thread and not hit all messages with
the given tag).
So I'd now like to fix '*' to be consistent with '+' and '-', for
which we add an item to TODO.
This would provide support for "muted" threads, as well as allowing for negative
filtering based on messages not matched by the original search, (but present in
threads that do have at least one matched message).
A new item from IRC discussion, (speeding up "notmuch restore"), as
well as a bug I just hit myself, (content from citations is not being
indexed).
While here, notce that several items have recently been completed ('?'
now displays documentation, not function names; we have a search
binding from notmush-show-mode; and "notmuch new" responds to SIGINT
by flushing). Finally, the item regarding optimizing chunky searching
is irrelevant since we dropped chunky searching in favor of the much
better streamed searching.
Since we need to do this for portability, (some systems don't have a
strndup function), we might as well do it unconditionally. There's
almost no disadvantage to doing so, and this has the advantages of not
requiring a configure-time check nor having two different
implementations, one of which would often be less tested.
This way, the user gets a steady (but bursty) stream of reults. We
double the chunk size each time since each successive chunk has to
redo work from all previous chunks.
Of course, the overall time is thereby slower, as the price we pay for
increased responsiveness. With a search returning about 17000 thread
results I measured a total time of 48.8 seconds before this change and
58.4 seconds afterwards.
The rudimentary aspect here is that the date ranges are specified with
UNIX timestamp values (number of seconds since 1970-01-01 UTC). One
thing that can help here is using the date program to determins
timestamps, such as:
$(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)
Long-term, we'll probably need to do our own query parsing to be able
to support directly-specified dates and also relative expressions like
"since:'2 months ago'".
I had these notes sitting in an uncommitted file that was cluttering
up my "git status" output. This cleans that up, and also shares the
ideas with the wider community.
This note was described in the previous commit message, but mistakenly
not committed:
The note about making "notmuch setup" faster is now rewritten to apply
to "notmuch new" since "notmuch setup" no longer does any mail
indexing.
We recently added support for "notmuch reply" and also made (most of)
the hidden components self documenting.
The note about making "notmuch setup" faster is now rewritten to apply
to "notmuch new" since "notmuch setup" no longer does any mail
indexing.
A recent "notmuch restore" command took *forever* for me. Obviously,
we need to fix the underlying performance bug in Xapian, but in the
meantime, a progress indicator would help.
The magic space bar is nice, but sometimes there's a message with a
long attachment that I just want to skip, but still consider the
message marked as read.
I had noticed several times earlier that having a talloc context
passed in would make things more convenient. I'm not exercising
that convenience yet, but the context is there now, (and there's
one fewer item on our TODO list).
The timestamp stuff we'll want to do soon, since it's a database
change, (though not a major one---at worst a handful of stale
timestamp documents would be left in the database).
"notmuch tag" is implemented now and seems to work great (and fast).
As for the race condition, as noted in the description we're removing
it's not exposed directly in the API, but only in a client that
allows for looping over search results and removing the inbox tag
from all of them. But then, that's exactly what the "notmuch tag"
command does. So, as discussed, we've now documented that command
to highlight the issue. Problem resolved, (as well as we can).
Interstingly, it's our simple "notmuch" client that's going to be the
most difficult to fix. There's just not as much information preserved
in the textual representation from "notmuch search" as there is in the
objects returned from notmuch_query_search_threads.
The archive-thread race condition doesn't even exist now because there's
no command for modifying tags at the level of a thread (just individual
messages).
