Message-ID: <fceba468c7dc42532528f699e51879ab.squirrel@webmail.sspaeth.de>
In-Reply-To: <87eil4ygar.fsf@servo.finestructure.net>
References: <87eil4ygar.fsf@servo.finestructure.net>
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 12:29:44 -0800
From: sebastian@sspaeth.de
To: "Notmuch Mail" <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.19
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Subject: Re: [notmuch] Request for high-priority improvements to notmuch
Precedence: list

Let me second those thoughts. I'll even put forward 2 more pet suggestions
:).

1)
> Ability to apply tags based on folder paths in "notmuch new"

This will let me sync tags with notmuchsync much more easily than going
through all mails and detecting their IMAP path from the filename. Support
for searching/tagging mails in certain folders would be really nice. I
would appreciate but do not urgently need a [tags] section in notmuch
proper, as I'll extend notmuchsync to do that for me.

2)
> JSON output for "notmuch search/show" with ability to filter output fields
> "search" --> "search --output=thread_id,date,number,author,subject,tags"
>  "show"  --> "search
> --output=message_id,tags,path,header,body,attachments"

YES PLEASE :-). notmuch seems designed to work in an ecosystem of
surrounding scripts, feeding data in and out. But we are all currently
limited to regexes for that. And heck, I hard a hard time understanding
why all hell broke out until I found that i had added a tag containing
parentheses which made my regex fail. :-). XML, JSON, any structured
output would be nice.

And as for filtering: YES, PLEASE :-). notmuchsync and many other 3rd
party apps would love that. As father of notmuchsync, I can tell you my
little script hickups very badly when slurping in 200k mails (including
text bodies) just to find out the maildir tags of those mails.

> * Proper maildir sync ("search --output=message_id,tags,path" ...)
[snip many sensible proposals]

Sebastian

P.S. as a bonus: My very ugly way of getting a distribution of existing
tags (extra points for beautified versions):

notmuch dump|sed -e 's/^.*(//'|sed -e 's/)$//'|sed 's/ /\n/g'|sort|uniq
-c|sort -r