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+From: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>\r
+To: Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez@igalia.com>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org\r
+In-Reply-To: <20091118002059.067214ed@hikari>\r
+References: <20091118002059.067214ed@hikari>\r
+Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:15:31 -0800\r
+Message-ID: <87aaykqe24.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org>\r
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+Subject: Re: [notmuch] Introducing myself\r
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+\r
+On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:20:59 +0100, Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez@igalia.com> wrote:\r
+> I have just heard about Not Much today in some random Linux-related news\r
+> site (LWN?), my name is Adrian Perez and I work as systems administrator\r
+\r
+Welcome to notmuch, Adrian! We're glad to have you here.\r
+\r
+> by default on most distribution. I got to have some mailboxes indexed and\r
+> basic searching working a couple of months ago. Lately I have been very\r
+> busy and had no time for coding, and them... boom! Not Much appears -- and\r
+> it is almost exactly what I was trying to do, but faster. I have been\r
+> playing a bit with Not Much today, and I think it has potential.\r
+\r
+It's funny, because I had the exact same experience with sup a couple of\r
+months ago. I had been frustrated for years with email programs, and had\r
+been thinking about how I'd like things to work n the back of my mind\r
+for a long time, (but never *quite* getting to the point where I would\r
+commit to writing an email system myself).\r
+\r
+And then... boom! I found sup and was instantly hooked. It had so much\r
+of what I had imagined, (and much of what I hadn't yet imagined) that I\r
+was quite delighted.\r
+\r
+It was really quite by accident that I ended up inventing a different\r
+system. I had started out just trying to speedup index creation for sup.\r
+If I hadn't run into the problem that it was very difficult[*] to create a\r
+sup-compatible index from C code, I might have stopped there.\r
+\r
+So I'd written a bunch of functional code, only to find myself stuck at\r
+the very last step, (hooking it up to the existing sup interface). Then\r
+Keith suggested emacs and it all seemed pretty easy since I'd already\r
+done all the Xapian work. So it's funny, I was only willing to commit to\r
+this project because I wasn't consciously aware I was working on it.\r
+Otherwise it would have seemed to overwhelming to start. :-)\r
+\r
+Anyway, that's a lot of off-topic rambling off of your introduction. But\r
+I'm glad that notmuch can now give that same "boom!" to others, and I'm\r
+glad you see potential in it.\r
+\r
+> Also, I would like to share one idea I had in mind, that you might find\r
+> interesting: One thing I have found very annoying is having to re-tag my\r
+> mail when the indexes get b0rked (it happened a couple of times to me while\r
+> using Sup), so I was planning to mails as read/unread and adding the tags\r
+> not just to the index, but to the mail text itself, e.g. by adding a\r
+> "X-Tags" header field or by reusing the "Keywords" one. This way, the index\r
+> could be totally recreated by re-reading the mail directories, and this\r
+> would also allow to a tools like OfflineIMAP [1] to get the mails into a\r
+> local maildir, tagging and indexing the mails with the e-mail reader and\r
+> then syncing back the messages with the "X-Tags" header to the IMAP server.\r
+> This would allow to use the mail reader from a different computer and still\r
+> have everything tagged finely.\r
+\r
+It is an interesting idea. But there's also something really comforting\r
+about the email indexed never modifying the mail files. If you're\r
+reading the notmuch commit logs closely you'll see that I'm not actually\r
+careful enough to be trusted with your mail (but I try). So I like that\r
+I don't even have to trust myself---the worst that happens is that I\r
+have to recreate my index.\r
+\r
+And as Keith mentioned, we've got the "notmuch dump; notmuch restore"\r
+idea working exactly as it did in sup. (Though I am thinking of also\r
+adding thread IDs to that now---more on that later.)\r
+\r
+The big annoyance I had with sup index creation, (I ended up having to\r
+do it more than once too), was that it takes *forever*. Right now,\r
+notmuch is a little bit faster, but not a lot faster. And I've got some\r
+ideas to fix that. It would be really nice if index creation were pain\r
+free. (And maybe it is for some user with small amounts of mail---oh, to\r
+have only 40000 messages to have to index!).\r
+\r
+-Carl\r
+\r
+[*] The problem here is that sup puts serialized ruby data structures\r
+into the data field of its Xapian documents. So being compatible with\r
+sup means being able to recreate serialized data structures for a\r
+particular version of ruby.\r
projects / notmuch-archives.git / commitdiff