[notmuch] tag dir proposal [was: Re: Git as notmuch object store]

[Ben Gamari]

Excerpts from martin f krafft's message of Thu Jan 28 17:17:35 -0500 2010:
> Cron-scheduling is a regular activity. I am talking about
> event-based scheduling. incron could do that and fire up a process
> every time a message is dropped into a directory, but notmuch
> doesn't provide me with an interface to say "you don't have to
> iterate the Maildir yourself since I know exactly what changed: just
> update your catalog with the new message in file foo/bar.msg".

Fair enough. After reading your arguments I think I might have initially
misunderstood you. I would actually tend to agree. Passing
paths to notmuch does seem to be a reasonable approach.

> 
> To me, notmuch-new is not Unix-y. To me,
> 
>   find $MAILDIR -type f -print0 | xargs -0 notmuch-update
> 
> is Unix-y. ;)
> 
I think it really depends upon what you are doing. I can certainly see
when you might be want to simply have notmuch synchronize the index
against the mail store. However, it seems the majority of the time one
simply desires to add a message to the index (i.e. after delivery).
Therefore, it seems like there is a place for both commands.

> > In my configuration, I simply have a bash script in ~/.bin that simply
> > runs offlineimap followed by notmuch new. This works quite nicely.
> 
> This is essentially the same situation as with slocate, which has to
> be run from cron currently, and hence gets outdated regularly.
> Compare this to a hypothetical filesystem that exposed an index of
> filenames (or content even!) to user-space, which could be used to
> quickly search for files in real-time without the need to run
> regular updates. I know other operating systems that have this
> functionality already.
> 
> Anyway, this is going off on a tangent, I feel.
> 
That might be true but that certainly won't stop. ;) One would think
that it wouldn't be difficult to teach slocate about inotify. I briefly
looked into this and found rlocate but quickly realized that it requires
its own kernel module. Apparently this has been investigated[1] and
the inotify watch count limit becomes an issue very quickly. I seem to
recall, however, that there were some whispers on the LKML about adding
an interface that would be more capable of supporting such a system. I
can't seem to recall the details, however, and homework beckons.

Cheers,

- Ben