[notmuch] indexing mail?

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:38:54 +0100, Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez at igalia.com> wrote:
> > the offending commit is 2c4555f1a56602ff1dd55a63699810522ba4d91e
> > 
> > from readdir (3):
> > 
> >      "Currently, only some file systems (among them: Btrfs, ext2, ext3,
> >      and ext4) have full  support  returning  the  file
> >        type in d_type.  All applications must properly handle a return
> >      of DT_UNKNOWN."

Yes. The broken code was my mistake. I clearly didn't read the above
warning closely enough. Sorry about that!

> I am using XFS, which always returns DT_UNKNOWN. Taking into account that
> there is a good deal of people using filesystems other than the ones you
> mention, and that other non-linux filesystems may also return DT_UNKNOWN,
> in my opinion there should be a fall-back. I will try to post a patch
> Anytime Soon™.

We definitely want the fallback. I can attempt to code it, but I don't
have ready access to an afflicted filesystem, so I'd need help testing
anyway.

I'd love to see a patch for this bug soon. Be sure to CC me when the
patch is sent and that will help me commit it sooner.

> Also, I have the feeling that the "d_type" field from "struct dirent" may
> not be available in some OSes because it is a BSD extension.

I'm generally quite bad at determining whether functionality I'm using
in my software is non-portable. As proven in this case, even when the
man page tells me something is not portable I don't always notice, (and
often, the man pages aren't even that useful).

Beyond that, even if something is *known* to be theoretically
non-portable, it can be a waste of time to code compatibility paths that
nobody will be running in practice.

So I've basically gotten to the point where I just code for what works
on my system, (not out of disregard for what other people run---just
that it's impossible for me to know what subset of functionality is
actually relevant). Then, at the same time, I'm quite happy to accept
code to improve the portability when people note that things are broken
on other systems.

See the git history and email archives for examples of how we fixed
strndup and getline portability problems.

I know that "wait for people to notice it's broken" isn't the nicest
thing we could do with our code. But I don't really know a much better
way. I'm happy to entertain suggestions here.

-Carl
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