[notmuch] Asynchronous tagging

[Carl Worth]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:45:30 +0100, Jed Brown <jed at 59A2.org> wrote:
> Actually, this popped up again.  I have a workaround, but here's the
> story if you are interested.

Hmmm... we definitely want to fix this, so let's figure this out.

> After changing a flag in Gmail and syncing with offlineimap, I get this
> in my inbox
> 
>  Today 19:18 [1/2] (null)                                   (null) (inbox unread)
> 
> And when I try to open it, the buffer is full of stderr.
> 
>   Error opening /home/jed/.mail-archive/gmail-all/new/1258826583_1.20705.kunyang,U=174235,FMD5=844bb96d088d057aa1b32ac1fbc67b56:2,: No such file or directory

Ah, OK. So you made a change on the Gmail side and that caused a file to
be renamed locally.

And yes, this currently makes notmuch very confused. That's a known
issue that needs to be documented better. And even better needs to be
fixed, (I just added a note for this to TODO).

> Explicitly archiving the null message removes it from these queries so
> the clutter is gone now, but it has to be done manually because the null
> message doesn't match any search terms.

Manually? All tag manipulation is done by search terms, so there's no
other way to remove a tag.

Or did you mean you removed the tag from within emacs? In that case, the
search term used to find the message is the message id itself. (Try
running "M-x visible-mode" from a notmuch-search view in emacs to see
what those look like.)

Meanwhile, just archiving the message won't make things perfect for
you. The document in the database point to the broken file is still
there. And it should still have all of its terms, so will likely show up
if you do more searches. (The "(null)" stuff you're seeing isn't because
the message is NULL---for example, notmuch was able to find the date,
etc. It's just that notmuch couldn't find the subject and authors when
it went to look for the file.)

So if GMail+offlineimap continues to shuffle your files around, you're
going to keep seeing more and more confusion like this buildup.

So we really just need to teach notmuch how to handle an unstable file
store in order to be able to use it in this kind of setup.

-Carl