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13 Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:15:45 -0800 (PST)
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14 From: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>
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15 To: Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez@igalia.com>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
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16 In-Reply-To: <20091118002059.067214ed@hikari>
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17 References: <20091118002059.067214ed@hikari>
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18 Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:15:31 -0800
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19 Message-ID: <87aaykqe24.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org>
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21 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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22 Subject: Re: [notmuch] Introducing myself
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23 X-BeenThere: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
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26 List-Id: "Use and development of the notmuch mail system."
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37 On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:20:59 +0100, Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez@igalia.com> wrote:
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38 > I have just heard about Not Much today in some random Linux-related news
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39 > site (LWN?), my name is Adrian Perez and I work as systems administrator
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41 Welcome to notmuch, Adrian! We're glad to have you here.
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43 > by default on most distribution. I got to have some mailboxes indexed and
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44 > basic searching working a couple of months ago. Lately I have been very
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45 > busy and had no time for coding, and them... boom! Not Much appears -- and
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46 > it is almost exactly what I was trying to do, but faster. I have been
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47 > playing a bit with Not Much today, and I think it has potential.
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49 It's funny, because I had the exact same experience with sup a couple of
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50 months ago. I had been frustrated for years with email programs, and had
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51 been thinking about how I'd like things to work n the back of my mind
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52 for a long time, (but never *quite* getting to the point where I would
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53 commit to writing an email system myself).
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55 And then... boom! I found sup and was instantly hooked. It had so much
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56 of what I had imagined, (and much of what I hadn't yet imagined) that I
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57 was quite delighted.
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59 It was really quite by accident that I ended up inventing a different
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60 system. I had started out just trying to speedup index creation for sup.
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61 If I hadn't run into the problem that it was very difficult[*] to create a
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62 sup-compatible index from C code, I might have stopped there.
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64 So I'd written a bunch of functional code, only to find myself stuck at
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65 the very last step, (hooking it up to the existing sup interface). Then
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66 Keith suggested emacs and it all seemed pretty easy since I'd already
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67 done all the Xapian work. So it's funny, I was only willing to commit to
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68 this project because I wasn't consciously aware I was working on it.
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69 Otherwise it would have seemed to overwhelming to start. :-)
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71 Anyway, that's a lot of off-topic rambling off of your introduction. But
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72 I'm glad that notmuch can now give that same "boom!" to others, and I'm
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73 glad you see potential in it.
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75 > Also, I would like to share one idea I had in mind, that you might find
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76 > interesting: One thing I have found very annoying is having to re-tag my
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77 > mail when the indexes get b0rked (it happened a couple of times to me while
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78 > using Sup), so I was planning to mails as read/unread and adding the tags
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79 > not just to the index, but to the mail text itself, e.g. by adding a
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80 > "X-Tags" header field or by reusing the "Keywords" one. This way, the index
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81 > could be totally recreated by re-reading the mail directories, and this
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82 > would also allow to a tools like OfflineIMAP [1] to get the mails into a
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83 > local maildir, tagging and indexing the mails with the e-mail reader and
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84 > then syncing back the messages with the "X-Tags" header to the IMAP server.
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85 > This would allow to use the mail reader from a different computer and still
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86 > have everything tagged finely.
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88 It is an interesting idea. But there's also something really comforting
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89 about the email indexed never modifying the mail files. If you're
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90 reading the notmuch commit logs closely you'll see that I'm not actually
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91 careful enough to be trusted with your mail (but I try). So I like that
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92 I don't even have to trust myself---the worst that happens is that I
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93 have to recreate my index.
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95 And as Keith mentioned, we've got the "notmuch dump; notmuch restore"
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96 idea working exactly as it did in sup. (Though I am thinking of also
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97 adding thread IDs to that now---more on that later.)
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99 The big annoyance I had with sup index creation, (I ended up having to
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100 do it more than once too), was that it takes *forever*. Right now,
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101 notmuch is a little bit faster, but not a lot faster. And I've got some
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102 ideas to fix that. It would be really nice if index creation were pain
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103 free. (And maybe it is for some user with small amounts of mail---oh, to
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104 have only 40000 messages to have to index!).
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108 [*] The problem here is that sup puts serialized ruby data structures
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109 into the data field of its Xapian documents. So being compatible with
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110 sup means being able to recreate serialized data structures for a
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111 particular version of ruby.
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projects / notmuch-archives.git / blob