Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 12:35:08 -0500
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/6] API for iterating over all messages in a thread
Message-ID: <20121126173508.GQ4562@mit.edu>
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Quoth Tomi Ollila on Nov 26 at  7:19 pm:
> On Sun, Nov 25 2012, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> 
> > Quoth Mark Walters on Nov 25 at  2:31 pm:
> >> 
> >> Hi
> >> 
> >> This series looks good to me (I have not reviewed the two bindings
> >> patches). Patch 2 looks like it makes things much easier to follow than
> >> the current code (if I understood the current pointer stuff it
> >> constructs the top-level list by doing pointer stuff to remove all
> >> messages which are replies from the complete message list). Indeed, the
> >> diff is more complicated than the new code!
> >> 
> >> On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> >> > This series adds a library API for iterating over all messages in a
> >> > thread in sorted order.  This is easy for the library to provide and
> >> > difficult to obtain from the current API.  Plus, if you don't count
> >> > the code added to the bindings, this series is actually a net
> >> > decrease of 4 lines of code because of simplifications it enables.
> >> >
> >> > Do we want the API to do more?  Currently it's very minimal, but I can
> >> > imagine two ways it could be generalized.  It could take an argument
> >> > to indicate which message list to return, which could be all messages,
> >> > matched messages, top-level messages, or maybe even unmatched messages
> >> > (possibly all in terms of message flags).  It could also take an
> >> > argument indicating the desired sort order.  Currently, the caller can
> >> > use existing message flag APIs to distinguish matched and unmatched
> >> > messages and there's a separate function for the top-level messages.
> >> > However, if the API could do all of these things, it would subsume
> >> > various other API functions, such as notmuch_thread_get_*_date.
> >> 
> >> I don't know if this is the right API. For the matched message etc I
> >> think using the existing message flag APIs is simple enough. I am not
> >> sure about sort orders though: that looks like it would be much easier
> >> for the caller to have the correct sort by I am not sure what users
> >> would need it.
> >
> > For sort order, I would be inclined to simply construct the reverse
> > list the first time a caller asks for it.  Theoretically the caller
> > could do this just as easily as the library, except that we don't
> > expose the list routines.
> >
> > If I do add sort order, I would also want to add some control over
> > which list is returned, since it would be asymmetric to be able to
> > request all messages in either order, but top-level messages only in
> > oldest-first.  I think this would be pretty simple, and would give us
> > a reasonably general-purpose and extensible API.  (It would also solve
> > the naming conundrum I mentioned below in my original email.)
> 
> The code looks good to me. 
> 
> I'm interested to see the extensible interface for returning desired
> list in desired sort order :)

I'll give this a shot (probably later today) and people can see what
they think.

> Tomi
> 
> >
> >> Best wishes
> >> 
> >> Mark
> >> 
> >> 
> >> >
> >> > Also, is this the right name for the new API?  In particular, if we do
> >> > later want to add a function that returns, say, the list of matched
> >> > messages, we'll have a convention collision with
> >> > notmuch_thread_get_matched_messages, which returns only a count.