[notmuch] Git ancestry and sync problems (was: Mail in git)

[Ben Gamari]

Excerpts from racin's message of Thu Feb 18 03:34:28 -0500 2010:
> 
> ----- "martin f krafft" <madduck at madduck.net> a écrit :
> 
> > Except I fear that as soon as we allow manipulation of the local
> > store, we'll potentially run into this problem:
> > 
> >   http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/2010/001114.html
> >   id:20100112045152.GA15275 at lapse.rw.madduck.net
> 
> I don't understand the problem. Why not just letting all "inbox" mails in a regular Maildir, 
> and use git only when they have been explicit archived? This way, mails are added to git only if we want
> to save them, and we rarely (never?) need to remove mail from the git store. Deleting mail
> is also much easier to do from the maildir. This mail flow would make much more sense to me.

Yes, this would certainly be much easier, but by doing this you also
pass up on using much of git's utility (although as we've discovered,
using it is non-trivial). In particular, I am very interested in using
git to keep my mail and tags synchronized across multiple machines. This
is an issue that I've always struggled with: While I dislike having my
mail tied to my laptop, there is no good two-way solution for
synchronizing maildirs and metadata across machines.

- Ben