DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma;
	h=mime-version:from:date:message-id:subject:to:content-type;
	b=drVYhvCuvMeByl5lyUd6D+WMOp9GxogGyzvAqBdKVIaRxTGvbDKQ51BNg5GNDQ4onc
	i5xpLL+At7NLq8iV76v3p0dAO5iaaA6qrFn29lGXTBQnE50cXoSKUrDmG+/whK8Ux0DR
	pZW4M9QbjG/k6+I+v43LnhoUKdVksaf6BuRRo=
MIME-Version: 1.0
From: Christophe-Marie Duquesne <chm.duquesne@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 19:37:21 +0100
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=Mzu9bu3y0RKB5YZUpZOT9qujXgxtpB-8Bvk=2@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: About the json output and the number of results shown.
To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Precedence: list

Hi,

The notmuch command line tool has an option that seems very
interesting to me: --output=json

In several languages, and especially in python, json is as easy to parse as:
>>> res = json.load(stream)
If your stream contains valid json, you then get all your data in res
and you can immediately use it.

With notmuch, some commands can bring a lot of results, and can take
some time to return. That is why when I began to write a curse
interface to notmuch, I added a mechanism to spawn these commands in
background and gather the results asynchronously. Sadly, this makes me
unable to use the built-in python json parser: As long as the output
has not finished, the data on the stream is not valid json since it
lacks at least the closing bracket '}'. As a consequence, I find
easier not to use json and parse the data as it arrives.

So I am wondering: what is the point of having a tool that is able to
output json and ending in not using it? Is there a solution to make
the json output more useable? One solution I've been thinking about
would be to add an option: the range of results to show (something
like --range=25:50). Is it doable easily? I mean: if results are not
guaranteed to be in a given order, that would obviously be an issue.
Same if finding the results 25:50 is exactly as long as finding the
results 1:50. Otherwise, if it is doable, I guess this mail is a
feature request. In any case, do you have any proposal for making
sense of this json output without modifications in the notmuch CLI?

Cheers,
Christophe-Marie Duquesne