[notmuch] Git as notmuch object store (was: Potential problem using Git for mail)

[Mike Kelly]

On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:49:00 +0100, "Sebastian Spaeth" <Sebastian at SSpaeth.de> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:46:59 +1300, martin f krafft <madduck at madduck.net> wrote:
> > I think we all kinda agreed that the Maildir flags should not be
> > used by notmuch and that things like Sebastian's notmuchsync should
> > be used if people wanted flags represented in Maildir filenames.
> 
> While notmuchsync fullfils my needs, it is a kludge. It needs to call
> "notmuch" for each mail where a MailDir flag has changed (which can be
> quite often on an initial run, where most mails are likely to be read),
> this can take a long, long time. It would makes sense IMHO to at least
> pick pioto's "don't set unread if 'S' flag is set" on notmuch new[1].

notmuchsync, as currently implemented, suffers from major performance
issues, in my opinion. It's a useful short term workaround, but not a
good long term solution.

But, I personally will always be using both notmuch and some other IMAP
client (my phone). I want the two to remain in sync easily enough.
notmuch is already much more robust with respect to that than sup, I
think (in terms of handling renames without barfing, etc).

At the very least, I want `notmuch new` to be able to:

  If it sees a rename that involves changing maildir flags, alter the
  related tags as necessary.

  Similarly, provide a mechanism for correlating the folder name with
  some set of tags, and change those tags as messages are moved around.  

For example, I might have:

~/.notmuch-config:

    [database]
    path=/home/pioto/mail
    ...
    [tags]
    pioto at pioto.org/INBOX.ListMail.notmuch = notmuch

So, a 'tags' section, where each key is the folder name, relative to the
db path, and the value is one or more tag names

This means that I could relabel a message in gmail, for example, and
have the changes apply to notmuch at my next offlineimap run. And, it
means that my existing procmail rules will still be useful both to
notmuch, and to my phone, for the purpose of categorizing things.

I agree that all this should be optional. But, since it is likely the
behavior most people would expect, I think it should be the default.

PS. You mean the 'new-unread' branch, not the 'noarg-count' branch, from
my repo.

-- 
Mike Kelly