Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2014 15:14:23 -0500
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/5] lib: make folder: prefix literal
Message-ID: <20140204201423.GP4375@mit.edu>
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Quoth Rob Browning on Jan 31 at  1:19 pm:
> Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> writes:
> 
> > folder: could work the way I suggested (simply the path to the file,
> > with {cur,new} stripped off).
> 
> Hmm, so would notmuch try to guess whether or not it's dealing with a
> maildir++ tree, and if so convert folder:foo to a search of .foo, and/or
> folder:foo/bar to .foo.bar?  Or would the user just need to know to say
> folder:.foo and folder:.foo.bar?

My opinion on this has changed over time, but I don't think we should
try to interpret Maildir++ trees specially.  That is, the user would
have to say folder:.foo.bar if they're using Maildir++.  The "." seems
as good as a "/" for a separator, so we might as well not translate
it.  The leading "." is annoying, but *shrug* so is Maildir++.

> And if we're only planning special treatment for for maildir-like
> stores, then I wonder if the term should just be maildir:?

The simple algorithm of taking the relative path and stripping
{new,cur} (if present) does a good job of supporting both Maildir and
non-Maildir stores (while balancing this support with simplicity,
predictability, and usability).

> Though folder: would make more sense if the long-term goal was to have a
> "DTRT" term.  But in that case, I wonder if it might eventually be
> expected to support mixed trees, i.e. say a tree containing maildir++
> and mh subdirs, and if so, how that should be handled.

The simple {new,cur}-stripping algorithm already does fairly well at
this.  Worrying more about mixed Maildir++ and MH stores seems
unnecessary to me unless someone demonstrates and actual need.

> > many shells support "**" for recursive path matching and people are
> > already quite familiar with glob patterns for paths, so why not simply
> > adopt this?
> 
> rsync too.

Ah, sure enough.  Even better!