[PATCH 0/2] Notmuch cat v2

[Carl Worth]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:28:02 +0200, Michal Sojka <sojkam1 at fel.cvut.cz> wrote:
> this is my second attempt to implement notmuch cat subcommand (the
> first version was posted in
> id:1271747793-17507-1-git-send-email-sojkam1 at fel.cvut.cz). This
> subcommand outputs the given message to stdout.

Hi Michal,

I'm *really* excited about this feature. The ability to more easily use
notmuch over ssh is really appealing, and as I mentioned previously, I
see this patch as a prerequisite for the maildir-synchronization work.

> In this version the arguments are classical notmuch search terms and
> not a filename as in the previous version. Emacs interface then uses
> message-id to retrieve the message.

Excellent. This is much better than before.

> Some people suggested that cat could be implemented as a special
> format of show subcommand. That would be possible, but it seems that
> show command always constructs threads form the messages which means
> that is executes several database queries. I consider this as
> unnecessary overhead and for that reason cat is a separate subcommand.

So I'll argue for "notmuch show --format=raw" here.

You're correct that the current implementation of "notmuch show" calls
notmuch_database_search_threads and --format=raw doesn't need to or want
to do that. But see, for example, recent notmuch-search.c and you'll see
that depending on the --output option, the "notmuch search" command will
sometimes call search_threads and will sometimes call
search_messages. So I think we want the same thing here.

Meanwhile, since this command is only acting on the first message
matched, don't you think it should be documented as only working with a
search term that matches a single message? Then it could simply print an
error message if the terms matched multiple messages.[*]

-Carl

[*] And we'll want that same behavior for "notmuch part" as well. That's
already implemented in notmuch-show.c and should also be implemented as
a sub-option of "notmuch show" I think, (which is probably another
outstanding patch for me to review). So there might be room for a little
code-sharing there.

-- 
carl.d.worth at intel.com
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