Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2012 20:49:38 -0500
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Aaron Ecay <aaronecay@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/4] emacs: new customization variable to exclude
	"deleted" messages from search
Message-ID: <20120109014938.GE20796@mit.edu>
References: <1325975294-646-1-git-send-email-jrollins@finestructure.net>
	<1325975294-646-2-git-send-email-jrollins@finestructure.net>
	<m2wr91ismu.fsf@gmail.com>
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Cc: Notmuch Mail <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
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> > @@ -927,6 +932,9 @@ The optional parameters are used as follows:
> >      (set 'notmuch-search-target-thread target-thread)
> >      (set 'notmuch-search-target-line target-line)
> >      (set 'notmuch-search-continuation continuation)
> > +    (when (and notmuch-search-exclude-deleted
> > +	       (not (string-match "tag:deleted[ )]*" query)))
> 
> “is:” is a synonym for “tag:” in searches – so this section of the code
> should look for it too.

There are several other things that could also trip up this regexp.
xtag:deletedx would be falsely matched, as would a quoted phrase
containing "tag:deleted", while tag:"deleted" and tag:(deleted) would
incorrectly not be matched.  Getting this right is hard, though I'd be
happy with

  "\\<\\(tag\\|is\\):deleted\\>"

or maybe

  "\\<\\(tag\\|is\\):\\(\"?\\)deleted\\>\\2"

Implicit exclusions like this were actually one of my target features
for the custom query parser, but I think hacking around that by
inspecting the query string is a fine interim solution.  (One of these
months I'll dust off the query parser, really!)