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This is simply 50 messages from the early history of the notmuch mailing list, (fetched from the public archives).
84 lines
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84 lines
4.3 KiB
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From: "Carl Worth" <cworth@cworth.org>
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To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
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Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:15:31 -0800
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Subject: [notmuch] Introducing myself
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In-Reply-To: <20091118002059.067214ed@hikari>
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References: <20091118002059.067214ed@hikari>
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Message-ID: <87aaykqe24.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org>
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On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:20:59 +0100, Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez at igalia.com> wrote:
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> I have just heard about Not Much today in some random Linux-related news
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> site (LWN?), my name is Adrian Perez and I work as systems administrator
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Welcome to notmuch, Adrian! We're glad to have you here.
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> by default on most distribution. I got to have some mailboxes indexed and
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> basic searching working a couple of months ago. Lately I have been very
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> busy and had no time for coding, and them... boom! Not Much appears -- and
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> it is almost exactly what I was trying to do, but faster. I have been
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> playing a bit with Not Much today, and I think it has potential.
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It's funny, because I had the exact same experience with sup a couple of
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months ago. I had been frustrated for years with email programs, and had
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been thinking about how I'd like things to work n the back of my mind
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for a long time, (but never *quite* getting to the point where I would
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commit to writing an email system myself).
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And then... boom! I found sup and was instantly hooked. It had so much
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of what I had imagined, (and much of what I hadn't yet imagined) that I
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was quite delighted.
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It was really quite by accident that I ended up inventing a different
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system. I had started out just trying to speedup index creation for sup.
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If I hadn't run into the problem that it was very difficult[*] to create a
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sup-compatible index from C code, I might have stopped there.
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So I'd written a bunch of functional code, only to find myself stuck at
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the very last step, (hooking it up to the existing sup interface). Then
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Keith suggested emacs and it all seemed pretty easy since I'd already
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done all the Xapian work. So it's funny, I was only willing to commit to
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this project because I wasn't consciously aware I was working on it.
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Otherwise it would have seemed to overwhelming to start. :-)
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Anyway, that's a lot of off-topic rambling off of your introduction. But
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I'm glad that notmuch can now give that same "boom!" to others, and I'm
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glad you see potential in it.
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> Also, I would like to share one idea I had in mind, that you might find
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> interesting: One thing I have found very annoying is having to re-tag my
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> mail when the indexes get b0rked (it happened a couple of times to me while
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> using Sup), so I was planning to mails as read/unread and adding the tags
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> not just to the index, but to the mail text itself, e.g. by adding a
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> "X-Tags" header field or by reusing the "Keywords" one. This way, the index
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> could be totally recreated by re-reading the mail directories, and this
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> would also allow to a tools like OfflineIMAP [1] to get the mails into a
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> local maildir, tagging and indexing the mails with the e-mail reader and
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> then syncing back the messages with the "X-Tags" header to the IMAP server.
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> This would allow to use the mail reader from a different computer and still
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> have everything tagged finely.
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It is an interesting idea. But there's also something really comforting
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about the email indexed never modifying the mail files. If you're
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reading the notmuch commit logs closely you'll see that I'm not actually
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careful enough to be trusted with your mail (but I try). So I like that
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I don't even have to trust myself---the worst that happens is that I
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have to recreate my index.
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And as Keith mentioned, we've got the "notmuch dump; notmuch restore"
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idea working exactly as it did in sup. (Though I am thinking of also
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adding thread IDs to that now---more on that later.)
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The big annoyance I had with sup index creation, (I ended up having to
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do it more than once too), was that it takes *forever*. Right now,
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notmuch is a little bit faster, but not a lot faster. And I've got some
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ideas to fix that. It would be really nice if index creation were pain
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free. (And maybe it is for some user with small amounts of mail---oh, to
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have only 40000 messages to have to index!).
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-Carl
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[*] The problem here is that sup puts serialized ruby data structures
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into the data field of its Xapian documents. So being compatible with
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sup means being able to recreate serialized data structures for a
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particular version of ruby.
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