[notmuch] Quick thoughts on a notmuch daemon

[Carl Worth]

Here's a little idea in case someone wants to write some code before I
get around to it.

Two current problems:

  1. You can't read mail (updating tags, etc.) at the same time new mail
     is being incorporated to the database. So if you have "notmuch new"
     as a cron job, then you will sometimes see "failed to obtain write
     lock" in emacs.

  2. Lots of people want to interact with a notmuch database on a remote
     server, for obvious reasons.

A simple solution would be a notmuch daemon that can accept commands on
stdin, (in basically the exact same form as the current notmuch
command-line interface). If the daemon does the job of periodically
incorporating new mail, then the only command necessary to solve (1)
above would be the tag command.

But with the other commands in place, (such as search and show), then
this could operate over ssh and all that would be necessary is one
additional command not in the current command line, (for "give me this
file"). And then the client could just maintain a local cache of mail
files as needed.

So that might be a nice project for somebody, and would likely be very
useful for many people.

-Carl
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