Re: [notmuch] RFC: output json from notmuch?

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+From: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>\r
+To: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org\r
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+Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:30:45 -0800\r
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+Subject: Re: [notmuch] RFC: output json from notmuch?\r
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+\r
+--=-=-=\r
+\r
+On Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:21:02 -0400, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:\r
+> It would be nice to have more structured output from notmuch-show.  I\r
+> decided to investigate sexp (i.e. lisp) and json output.\r
+\r
+Thanks, David!\r
+\r
+> Then I found that json parsing is provided by the library json.el\r
+> shipped with emacs23, so I decided to play with json a bit.\r
+\r
+That sounds very promising. I wasn't aware this existed inside emacs\r
+already.\r
+\r
+> I settled on the jansson library (http://www.digip.org/jansson/)\r
+> because it seemed to have a sane api and documentation, but there are\r
+> many choices.  I'll follow up with the actual patch, but the idea is to\r
+> replace the printfs in show_message with calls to set (key,value) pairs\r
+> in a json object, and output it at the end.\r
+\r
+I'm still not sure of the need to depend on a library just to *generate*\r
+any particular format. I would expect that job to be so constrained as\r
+to be almost trivial. I won't necessarily block a patch based on that,\r
+but I think we should at least look at how easy it would be to just emit\r
+the syntax manually.\r
+\r
+> So, do people think this is a reasonable idea to persue?\r
+\r
+I do, yes. The current lack of full quoting is an obnoxious bug.\r
+\r
+>     1) it adds a dependency, but not a heavy one. jansson is about 300k\r
+>     installed on debian/i386\r
+\r
+That might be acceptable. And we might rewrite the patch to avoid it as\r
+well. I'd like to see what that would take.\r
+\r
+>     2) It might mean that people using emacs22 might have to score\r
+>     json.el from somewhere; I'm not sure.\r
+\r
+Currently, it sounds like notmuch is entirely unusable from emacs22, so\r
+I'm really not too concerned about one more thing that requires emacs\r
+23.\r
+\r
+>     3) There is some increase in memory use since the whole thread has\r
+>     to be built as a json object before being output.\r
+\r
+Right. That would be another reason to just stream the output\r
+manually. The syntax doesn't require things like knowing the size of an\r
+array before emitting the first element, right?\r
+\r
+>     4) Of course jansson is doing it's own reference counting memory\r
+>     managment, and not using talloc. But we already have glib...\r
+\r
+It's not evil to not use talloc. So not an issue there.\r
+\r
+-Carl\r
+\r
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