Note that the difference between thread results in date order and
thread results in reverse-date order is not simply a matter of
reversing the final results. When sorting in date order, the threads
are sorted by the oldest message in the thread. When sorting in
reverse-date order, the threads are sorted by the newest message in
the thread.
This difference means that we might want an explicit option in the
interface to reverse the order, (even though the default will be to
display the inbox in date order and global searches in reverse-date
order).
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.
I thought it would be safe enough to return a few extra threads,
(since we happened to already get the relevant messages out of the
database). The problem is that then requires the caller to carefully
read the number of threads returned and adjust its next "first" value
accordingly. The interface is much simpler to use if we simply return
exactly what is asked for and no more.
This serves me right for committing untested code. The
notmuch_query_search_threads was totally broken, (it didn't properly
treat -1 as being unlimited and instead returned no threads in that
case).
The library interface now allows the caller to do incremental searches,
(such as one page of results at a time). Next we'll just need to hook
this up to "notmuch search" and the emacs interface.
