From: Pieter Praet <pieter@praet.org>
To: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Output unmodified Content-Type header value for JSON
	format.
In-Reply-To: <20120112172840.GC18625@mit.edu>
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Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:19:33 +0100
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On Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:28:40 -0500, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> Quoth Pieter Praet on Jan 12 at  6:07 pm:
> > On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:40:21 -0500, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> > > Quoth Jameson Graef Rollins on Nov 20 at 12:10 pm:
> > > > The open question seems to be how we handle the content encoding
> > > > parameters.  My argument is that those should either be used by notmuch
> > > > to properly encode the content for the consumer.  If that's not
> > > > possible, then just those parameters needed by the consumer to decode
> > > > the content should be output.
> > > 
> > > If notmuch is going to include part content in the JSON output (which
> > > perhaps it shouldn't, as per recent IRC discussions), then it must
> > > handle content encodings because JSON must be Unicode and therefore
> > > the content strings in the JSON must be Unicode.
> > 
> > Having missed the IRC discussions: what is the rationale for not
> > including (specific types of?) part content in the JSON output ?
> > Eg. how about inline attached text/x-patch ?
> 
> Technically the IRC discussion was about not including *any* part
> content in the JSON output, and always using show --format=raw or
> similar to retrieve desired parts.  Currently, notmuch includes part
> content in the JSON only for text/*, *except* when it's text/html.  I
> assume non-text parts are omitted because binary data is hard to
> represent in JSON and text/html is omitted because some people don't
> need it.  However, this leads to some peculiar asymmetry in the Emacs
> code where sometimes it pulls part content out of the JSON and
> sometimes it retrieves it using show --format=raw.  This in turn leads
> to asymmetry in content encoding handling, since notmuch handles
> content encoding for parts included in the JSON (and there's no good
> way around that since JSON is Unicode), but not for parts retrieved as
> raw.
> 
> The idea discussed on IRC was to remove all part content from the JSON
> output and to always use show to retrieve it, possibly beefing up
> show's support for content decoding (and possibly introducing a way to
> retrieve multiple raw parts at once to avoid re-parsing).  This would
> get the JSON format out of the business of guessing what consumers
> need, simplify the Emacs code, and normalize content encoding
> handling.

Full ACK.

One concern though (IIUC): Due to the prevalence of retarded MUA's, not
outputting 'text/plain' and/or 'text/html' parts is unfortunately all
too often equivalent to not outputting anything at all, so wouldn't we,
in essence, be reducing `show --format=json' to an ever-so-slightly
augmented `search --format=json' ?


Peace

-- 
Pieter