We were sleeping merely to ensure that our updates to the mail store
would result in the mtime of the appropriate directories being
updated. We make the test suite run faster by not sleeping, but
instead explicitly updating the mtime of the directory to a future
time with touch.
We're careful to ensure that the time is not merely in the future
compared to the current time, but also later than any previous update
to the same directory mtime.
This makes the test suite bash-specific, but that's not much of
an issue for me, (if somebody else would prefer some other language
then they can rewrite the test suite and maintain it).
The advantage here is that we'll now be able to easily generate
custom messages for testing operations that depend on the message
content, (such as "notmuch reply", etc.).
This notmuch-test script simply runs a few different notmuch operations,
(things that I found were useful while testing the rename-support code).
It's not useful as a test suite yet, since it doesn't actually check
the results of any operation, (the user of the suite has to know what
the results should be and must manually verify them. So there's no
integration with the build system yet, (no "make test" target).
But I didn't want to lose what I had so far, so here it is.