From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] emacs: Use the minibuffer for CLI error reporting
In-Reply-To: <87ehi1j32b.fsf@qmul.ac.uk>
References: <1357174222-25132-1-git-send-email-amdragon@mit.edu>
	<1357249669-9706-1-git-send-email-amdragon@mit.edu>
	<87ehi1j32b.fsf@qmul.ac.uk>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.14+236~gf64406d (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.4.1
	(i486-pc-linux-gnu)
Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2013 16:12:31 -0500
Message-ID: <87y5g6j9s0.fsf@awakening.csail.mit.edu>
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Precedence: list

On Thu, 03 Jan 2013, Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 03 Jan 2013, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote:
>> We recently switched to popping up a buffer to report CLI errors, but
>> this was too intrusive, especially for transient errors and especially
>> since we made fewer things ignore errors.  This patch changes this to
>> display a basic error message in the minibuffer (using Emacs' usual
>> error handling path) and, if there are additional details, to log
>> these to a separate error buffer and reference the error buffer from
>> the minibuffer message.  This is more in line with how Emacs typically
>> handles errors, but makes the details available to the user without
>> flooding them with the details.
>>
>> Given this split, we pare down the basic message and make it more
>> user-friendly, and also make the verbose message even more detailed
>> (and more debugging-oriented).
>> ---
>>
>> This version fixes two hard-coded paths in the tests.
>
>
> This version looks good to me but I have one query we may like to
> consider. 
>
> At the moment notmuch-call-notmuch-process returns the stderr mixed with
> stdout and we might like to separate that out (particularly as the error
> message lists stderr and stdout separately and in this case it all gets
> called stdout).

This sounds like a good idea to me, though I'd rather do it as a
separate patch.  Your patch looks good to me (modulo commit message,
obviously).  Care to roll an official patch?

As I mentioned elsewhere, there are several direct calls to notmuch that
don't go through any of this error handling (for example,
`notmuch-call-notmuch-process' is only used in 'notmuch-tag').  It would
be great if Someone (TM) cleaned this up.

> I attach a patch that does this: I am not really familiar with this so I
> just took Austin's code from notmuch-call-notmuch-json.
>
> Austin: obviously feel free to fold this into your patch if you think
> appropriate.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Mark
>
> From b73395c8efb57111bd4de281797004747de6c2ed Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2013 22:25:02 +0000
> Subject: [PATCH] tweak notmuch-call-notmuch-process
>
> ---
>  emacs/notmuch.el |   10 +++++++---
>  1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/emacs/notmuch.el b/emacs/notmuch.el
> index c98a4fe..4f7ee2c 100644
> --- a/emacs/notmuch.el
> +++ b/emacs/notmuch.el
> @@ -540,9 +540,13 @@ If notmuch exits with a non-zero status, output from the process
>  will appear in a buffer named \"*Notmuch errors*\" and an error
>  will be signaled."
>    (with-temp-buffer
> -    (let ((status (apply #'call-process notmuch-command nil t nil args)))
> -      (notmuch-check-exit-status status (cons notmuch-command args)
> -				 (buffer-string)))))
> +    (let ((err-file (make-temp-file "nmerr")))
> +      (unwind-protect
> +	  (let ((status (apply #'call-process
> +			       notmuch-command nil (list t err-file) nil args)))
> +	    (notmuch-check-exit-status status (cons notmuch-command args)
> +				       (buffer-string) err-file))
> +	(delete-file err-file)))))
>  
>  (defun notmuch-search-set-tags (tags &optional pos)
>    (let ((new-result (plist-put (notmuch-search-get-result pos) :tags tags)))
> -- 
> 1.7.9.1