[notmuch] Asynchronous tagging

[Jed Brown]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:00:13 +0100, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> Ah, OK. So you made a change on the Gmail side and that caused a file to
> be renamed locally.

yes

> 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.)

Exactly, that's what I meant by manually.  Those messages don't match a
nice generic pattern.

> 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.)

Yeah.

> 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.

This seems unavoidable with maildir in the presence of any
synchronization, or use of a different client.

An ugly, but possible solution would be to mirror the entire maildir via
hard links with whatever naming scheme you like.  You then have a stable
link to the file and can resolve changing names in the real maildir.
This eats up a lot of inodes.

Jed