This is a fairly big milestone for notmuch. It's our first command
to do anything besides building the index, so it proves we can
actually read valid results out from the index.
It also puts in place almost all of the API and infrastructure we
will need to allow searching of the database.
Finally, with this change we are now using talloc inside of notmuch
which is truly a delight to use. And now that I figured out how
to use C++ objects with talloc allocation, (it requires grotty
parts of C++ such as "placement new" and "explicit destructors"),
we are valgrind-clean for "notmuch dump", (as in "no leaks are
possible").
This is in preparation for a new, public notmuch_message_t.
Eventually, the public notmuch_message_t is going to grow enough
features to need to be file-backed and will likely need everything
that's now in message-file.c. So we may fold these back into one
object/implementation in the future.
We were properly feeing this memory when the thread-ids list was not
empty, but leaking it when it was.
Thanks, of course, to valgrind along with the G_SLICE=always-malloc
environment variable which makes leak checking with glib almost
bearable.
I was incorrectly using the return value of stat (-1) instead of
errno (ENOENT) to try to construct the error message here.
Also, while we're here, reword the error message to not have
"stat" in it, which in spite of what a Unix programmer will
tell you, is not actually a word.
When documenting these functions I described support for a
NOTMUCH_BASE environment variable to be consulted in the case
of a NULL path. Only, I had forgotten to actually write the
code.
This code exists now, with a new, exported function:
notmuch_database_default_path
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).
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.
This is the beginning of the notmuch library as well, with its
interface in notmuch.h. So far we've got create, open, close, and
add_message (all with a notmuch_database prefix).
The current add_message function has already been whittled down from
what we have in notmuch-index-message to add only references,
message-id, and thread-id to the index, (that is---just enough to do
thread-linkage but nothing for full-text searching).
The concept here is to do something quickly so that the user can get
some data into notmuch and start using it. (The most interesting stuff
is then thread-linkage and labels like inbox and unread.) We can
defer the full-text indexing of the body of the messages for later,
(such as in the background while the user is reading mail).
The initial thread-stitching step is still slower than I would like.
We may have to stop using libgmime for this step as its overhead is
not worth it for the simple case of just parsing the message-id,
references, and in-reply-to headers.