[notmuch] Introducing notmuchsync

[Sebastian Spaeth]

On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:49:44 -0500, Jameson Rollins <jrollins at finestructure.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:19:06 -0800, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> > I think that's the open question still. How much of this kind of
> > functionality do we integrate into notmuch itself. I don't know the
> > answer to that question yet, but I'm quite happy to see people
> > experimenting with doing scripts like this on top of notmuch already.

It's a fine line and depends a lot on how people actually use
notmuch. One thing that I would strongly advocate is to take on the
"respect maildir flags when importing with notmuch new" patch. This
enables me to use webmail/thunderbird (my mom at my home place is curiously still
refusing to switch to notmuch) etc.

As for the rest, I'd agree that we can be conservative in accepting new
notmuch features (part of its appeal is that its so darn simple) while
trying to make things easier for an ecosystem of surrounding apps.

> In fact, I actually gave up on syncing notmuch and maildir, and am
> basically punting on maildir altogether.  This is slightly problematic
> because notmuch is still missing some key features so I occasionally
> have to use other mailers to achieve certain things (especially OpenPGP
> stuff).  I worry about it down the line as well, if I ever have to use
> another mailer for any reason.  All mail I've received since my switch
> to notmuch will show up as "unread" in maildir readers.


> I think notmuch wrapper scripts like notmuchsync are going to be crucial
> for notmuch down the line, so I definitely agree that doing everything
> possible to make it easier for them is a very good thing.  I am using
> notmuchsync for deleting "delete" tagged messages, for which it's very
> useful.  It's pretty slow, though, which I've been chalking up to the
> fact that it has to parse the notmuch "show" output.  Once notmuch can
> output just the paths to messages matching search results that should
> get much much faster.

It's slow for deleting messages? That would surprise me, as it only
needs to parse/look at messages with a 'delete' or 'maildir::trashed'
tag.
Syncing from notmuch to maildir flags *is* slow. Limiting the output
to filenames will help greatly there (I hope). However by design it
needs to compare tags from *all* your messages with the corresponding
file name as stored in notmuch. I have no solution as how to make this
easier, at least not without adding a "needsync" tag or so when "deleting, replying,
reading, etc".

Sebastian