From: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>
To: Jed Brown <jed@59A2.org>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
In-Reply-To: <87y6lx4cfr.fsf@59A2.org>
References: <1258920736-14205-1-git-send-email-jed@59A2.org>
	<87ocmtg9ni.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org> <87y6lx4cfr.fsf@59A2.org>
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:00:57 -0800
Message-ID: <87pr75q9va.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Subject: Re: [notmuch] [PATCH] New function notmuch-search-operate-all:
 operate on all messages in the current query.
Precedence: list

On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:07:20 +0100, Jed Brown <jed@59A2.org> wrote:
> > Second, since we're in the search view which shows threads, we should
> > really be operating on threads. But this tag command won't work like the
> > '+' and '-' commands in this buffer. Those commands will add/remove a
> > tag to/from every message in the thread[*]. The new '*' command, however
> > will only be changing tags on messages that match the query.
> 
> I'm not convinced that we want to operate on the entire thread.
> Applying the tag only to the matched messages is enough to find the
> thread, and it may really be desirable to only have it applied to
> certain messages in the thread.  For example, I might have constructed
> an elaborate query to find five messages, including a couple that are
> burried in 100-message threads in which case I would definitely not want
> to tag entire threads.

That's a legitimate point.

But my point is that whatever behavior we choose here, I want the
commands that operate on a single thread (+, -, a) to operate exactly
the same as the command that operates on all threads (*). Having these
behave subtly different, (as in the current patch) is going to lead to
confusion on the part of the user.

So, tagging only matching messages could make a lot of sense. If so,
let's make the operations on single threads work the same.

The race-condition issues apply to both operations, so I won't make the
current patch block on resolving those.

-Carl