From: Jesse Rosenthal <jrosenthal@jhu.edu>
To: David Edmondson <dme@dme.org>, notmuch <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
In-Reply-To: <87sk99xsd6.fsf@aw.hh.sledj.net>
References: <87sk99xsd6.fsf@aw.hh.sledj.net>
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:19:21 -0500
Message-ID: <871vgti5ye.fsf@jhu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Subject: Re: [notmuch] hello, 'automated' tagging, synchronisation
Precedence: list


Hi David,

On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:06:13 +0000, David Edmondson <dme@dme.org> wrote:
> 2. ... So far my (unimplemented) solution for this
>    is to dump/restore the tags and store the dump under version
>    control. Moving from one computer to another (which I don't do very
>    often) would involve:
>          a$ notmuch dump >tags
>          a$ git commit tags
>          a$ git push
>          b$ git pull
>          b$ notmuch restore tags
>    With appropriate amounts of conflict resolution should I update the
>    tags on both a and b.

This seems to be the going solution. However, if you have a stable
connection and password-free ssh access to your home computer (as I do,
from my work computer) I've had good luck just using the emacs client
remotely, without even having notmuch installed on the second machine,
by pointing the emacs variable `notmuch-command' to a shell script
which, essentially, runs the following:

        ssh user@host /usr/local/bin/notmuch $@

The script is a bit more complicated, and it requires a very tiny patch
to notmuch.el (no effect on local usage, I posted it on the list
somewhere). But if you have a fast, stable connection, and you make use
of an open ssh connection, it's almost as fast as local use, and doesn't
require dumping back and forth.

Problem: It can't at the moment handle attachments and, I imagine, the
new html-inlining, which both use emacs code that refers to
(insert-file-contents). One alternative would
be to replace the (insert-file-contents) calls with TRAMP calls:

   (insert-file-contents (concat "/ssh:" host ":" file))

I'm also working on a trivial, but abstractable, solution that adds
something like "notmuch show --raw-file," which could replace all of
those emacs calls with notmuch calls, and which can therefore use the
hacked-up client-server model. In other words, the latter solution would
work in both the local and remote case, without having to alter the
emacs client.

This solution is not perfect, and it might not fit your needs, but I
wanted to mention it, in addition to the dumping-restoring, as something
that has been working well for me for a while now, when I have to use a
second computer.

Best,
Jesse