The new implementation is simply a talloc-based list of strings. The
former support (a list of database terms with a common prefix) is
implemented by simply pre-iterating over the terms and populating the
list. This should provide no performance disadvantage as callers of
thigns like notmuch_directory_get_child_files are very likely to
always iterate over all filenames anyway.
This new implementation of notmuch_filenames_t is in preparation for
adding API to query all of the filenames for a single message.
These various functions and data are all used only locally, so should
be marked static. Ensuring we get these right will avoid us accidentally
leaking unintended symbols through the library interface.
Previously we were using Xapian's add_document to allocate document ID
values for notmuch_message_t objects. This had the drawback of adding
a partially constructed mail document to the database. If notmuch was
subsequently interrupted before fully populating this document, then
later runs would be quite confused when seeing the partial documents.
There are reports from the wild of people hitting internal errors of
the form "Message ... has no thread ID" for example, (which is
currently an unrecoverable error).
We fix this by manually allocating document IDs without adding
documents. With this change, we never call Xapian's add_document
method, but only replace_document with either the current document ID
of a message or a new one that we have allocated.
We rename 'has_more' to 'valid' so that it can function whether
iterating in a forward or reverse direction. We also rename
'advance' to 'move_to_next' to setup parallel naming with
the proposed functions 'move_to_first', 'move_to_last', and
'move_to_previous'.
The WDF is the "within-document frequency" value for a particular
term. It's intended to provide an indication of how frequent a term is
within a document, (for use in computing relevance). Xapian's term
generator already computes WDF values when we use that, (which we do
for indexing all mail content).
We don't use the term generator when adding single terms for things
that don't actually appear in the mail document, (such as tags, the
filename, etc.). In this case, the WDF value for these terms doesn't
matter much.
But Xapian's flint backend can be more efficient with changes to terms
that don't affect the document "length". So there's a performance
advantage for manipulating tags (with the flint backend) if the WDF of
these terms is 0.
Previously, many checks were deep in the library just before a cast
operation. These have now been replaced with internal errors and new
checks have instead been added at the beginning of all top-levelentry
points requiring a read-write database.
The new checks now also use a single function for checking and
printing the error message. This will give us a convenient location to
extend the check, (such as based on database version as well).
This new directory ojbect provides all the infrastructure needed to
detect when files or directories are deleted or renamed. There's still
code needed on top of this (within "notmuch new") to actually do that
detection.
