notmuch release 0.4 now available
Carl Worth
cworth at cworth.org
Mon Nov 1 23:33:04 PDT 2010
After a (regrettable) 6-month hiatus, here is a new release of notmuch.
I have not yet completed the merging of all interesting, outstanding
patches, (nor even all the obvious ones), but I felt it was important to
start having releases happen again.
It may sound foolhardy, but I really would like to have releases happen
as often as once per week. My plan is to start each week by simply
looking to see if new code has landed, and if so, push it out in a new
release.
Let's see how well that works.
In the meantime, enjoy this release which provides some important new
command-line functionality, (notmuch search --output, notmuch show
--format=mbox), lots of emacs interfaces (all sent messages now saved to
mail store by default), and one fairly critical bug fix (avoid a
possibility for a corrupt database if "notmuch new" is interrupted).
There's a lot more beyond that as well. See below for details.
-Carl
--
carl.d.worth at intel.com
Where to obtain notmuch 0.4
===========================
http://notmuchmail.org/releases/notmuch-0.4.tar.gz
Which can be verified with:
http://notmuchmail.org/releases/notmuch-0.4.tar.gz.sha1
d40cb07adab0d595c64e9b73f1fd306cc9dff106 notmuch-0.4.tar.gz
http://notmuchmail.org/releases/notmuch-0.4.tar.gz.sha1.asc
(signed by Carl Worth)
What's new in notmuch 0.4
=========================
New command-line features
-------------------------
notmuch search --output=(summary|threads|messages|tags|files)
This new option allows for particular items to be returned from
notmuch searches. The "summary" option is the default and behaves
just as "notmuch search" has historically behaved.
The new option values allow for thread IDs, message IDs, lists of
tags, and lists of filenames to be returned from searches. It is
expected that this new option will be very useful in shell
scripts. For example:
for file in $(notmuch search --output=files <search-terms>); do
<operations-on> "$file"
done
notmuch show --format=mbox <search-specification>
This new option allows for the messages matching a search
specification to be presented as an mbox. Specifically the "mboxrd"
format is used which allows for reversible quoting of lines
beginning with "From ". A reader should remove a single '>' from the
beginning of all lines beginning with one or more '>' characters
followed by the 5 characters "From ".
notmuch config [get|set] <section>.<item> [value ...]
The new top-level "config" command allows for any value in the
notmuch configuration file to be queried or set to a new value. Both
single-valued and multi-valued items are supported, as our any
custom items stored in the configuration file.
Avoid setting Bcc header in "notmuch reply"
We decided that this was a bit heavy-handed as the actual mail
user-agent should be responsible for setting any Bcc option. Also,
see below for the notmuch/emacs user-agent now setting an Fcc by
default rather than Bcc.
New library features
--------------------
Add notmuch_query_get_query_string and notmuch_query_get_sort
These are simply functions for querying properties of a
notmuch_query_t object.
New emacs features
------------------
Enable Fcc of all sent messages by default (to "sent" directory)
All messages sent from the emacs interface will now be saved to the
notmuch mail store where they will be incorporated to the database
by the next "notmuch new". By default, messages are saved to the
"sent" directory at the top-level of the mail store. This directory
can be customized by means of the "Notmuch Fcc Dirs" option in the
notmuch customize interface.
Ability to all open messages in a thread to a pipe
Historically, the '|' keybinding allows for piping a single message
to an external command. Now, by prefixing this key with a prefix
argument, (for example, by pressing "Control-U |"), all open
messages in the current thread will be sent to the external command.
Optional support for detecting inline patches
This hook is disabled by default but can be enabled with a checkbox
under "Notmuch Show Insert Text/Plain Hook" in the notmuch customize
interface. It allows for inline patches to be detected and treated
as if they were attachments, (with context-sensitive highlighting).
Automatically tag messages as "replied" when sending a reply
Messages replied to within the emacs interface will now be tagged as
"replied". This feature can easily be customized to add or remove
other tags as well. For example, a user might use a tag of
"needs-reply" and can configure this feature to automatically remove
that tag when replying. See "Notmuch Message Mark Replied" in the
notmuch customize interface.
Allow search-result color specifications to overlay each other
For example, one tag can specify the background color of matching
lines, while another can specify the foreground. With this change,
both settings will now be visible simultaneously, (which was not the
case in previous releases). See "Notmuch Search Line Faces" in the
notmuch customize interface.
Make hidden author names still available for incremental search.
When there is insufficient space to display all authors of a thread
in search results, the names of hidden authors are now still made
available to emacs' incremental search commands. As the user
searches, matching lines will temporarily expand to show the hidden
names.
New binding of Control-TAB (works like TAB in reverse)
Many notmuch nodes already use TAB to navigate forward through
various items allowing actions, (message headers, email attachments,
etc.). The new Control-TAB binding operates similarly but in the
opposite direction.
New build-system features
-------------------------
Various portability fixes have been applied
These include fixes for build failures on at least Solaris, FreeBSD,
and Fedora systems. We're hopeful that the notmuch code base is now
more portable than ever before.
Arrange for libnotmuch to be found automatically after make install
The notmuch build system is now careful to help the user avoid
errors of the form "libnotmuch.so could not be found" immediately
after installing. This support takes two forms:
1. If the library is installed to a system directory,
(configured in /etc/ld.so.conf), then "make install" will
automatically run ldconfig.
2. If the library is installed to a non-system directory, the
build system adds a DR_RUNPATH entry to the final binary
pointing to the directory to which the library is installed.
When this support works, the user should be able to run notmuch
immediately after "make install", without any errors trying to find
the notmuch library, and without having to manually set environment
variables such as LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
Check compiler/linker options before using them
The configure script now carefully checks that any desired
compilation options, (whether for enabling compiler warnings, or for
embedding rpath, etc.), are supported. Only supported options are
used in the resulting Makefile.
New test-suite features
-----------------------
New modularization of test suite.
Thanks to a gracious relicensing of the test-suite infrastructure
from the git project, notmuch now has a modular test suite. This
provides the ability to run individual sections of the test suite
rather than the whole things. It also provides better summary of
test results, with support for tests that are expected to fail
(BROKEN and FIXED) in addition to PASS and FAIL. Finally, it makes
it easy to run the test suite within valgrind (pass --valgrind to
notmuch-test or to any sub-script) which has been very useful.
New testing of emacs interface.
The test suite has been augmented to allow automated testing of the
emacs interfaces. So far, this includes basic searches, display of
threads, and tag manipulation. This also includes a test that a new
message can successfully be sent out through a (dummy) SMTP server
and that said message is successfully integrated into the notmuch
database via the FCC setting.
General bug fixes
-----------------
Fix potential corruption of database when "notmuch new " is interrupted.
Previously, an interruption of "notmuch new" would (rarely) result
in a corrupt database. The corruption would manifest itself by a
persistent error of the form:
document ID of 1234 has no thread ID
The message-adding code has been carefully audited and reworked to
avoid this sort of corruption regardless of when it is interrupted.
Fix failure with extremely long message ID headers.
Previously, a message with an extremely long message ID, (say, more
than 300 characters), would fail to be added to notmuch, (triggering
Xapian exceptions). This has now been fixed.
Fix for messages with "charset=unknown-8bit"
Previously, messages with this charset would cause notmuch to emit a
GMime warning, (which would then trip up emacs or other interfaces
parsing the notmuch results).
Fix notmuch_query_search_threads function to return NULL on any exception
Fix "notmuch search" to return non-zero if notmuch_query_search_threads fails
Previously, this command could confusingly report a Xapian
exception, yet still return an error code of 0. It now correctly
returns a failing error code of 1 in this case.
Emacs bug fixes
---------------
Fix to handle a message with a subject containing, for example "[1234]"
Previously, a message subject containing a sequence of digits within
square brackets would cause the emacs interface to mis-parse the
output of "notmuch search". This would result in the message being
mis-displayed and prevent the user from manipulating the message in
the emacs interface.
Fix to correctly handle message IDs containing ".."
The emacs interface now properly quotes message IDs to avoid a
Xapian bug in which the ".." within a message ID would be
misinterpreted as a numeric range specification.
Python-binding fixes
--------------------
The python bindings for notmuch have been updated to work with python3.
Debian-specific fixes
---------------------
Fix emacs initialization so "M-x notmuch" works for users by default.
Now, a new Debian user can immediately run "emacs -f notmuch" after
"apt-get install notmuch". Previously, the user would have had to
edit the ~/.emacs file to add "(require 'notmuch)" before this would
work.
What is notmuch
===============
Notmuch is a system for indexing, searching, reading, and tagging
large collections of email messages in maildir or mh format. It uses
the Xapian library to provide fast, full-text search with a convenient
search syntax.
For more about notmuch, see http://notmuchmail.org
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