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.
