Tag changes not persisted in message view

[Michal Sojka]

On Sun, 09 Jan 2011, Günter Ladwig wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I installed notmuch yesterday and imported an account with about 9000 
> mails. The import worked fine and the Emacs client shows all messages.
> 
> However, I ran into an problem with changing tags in the message view: I 
> noticed that mails were not marked as read (i.e., their unread tag was 
> not removed) after reading them in the message view. After some 
> experimentation I can say that adding or removing tags in the message 
> view does not work at all (neither manually nor implicitly through 
> reading or archiving). While the UI is updated (i.e., the tags shown in 
> the headers), the changes are not persisted. Neither the search results 
> view nor the command line client show the changes made in the message 
> view. After reopening a message, the tags will again appear as before.

Hi,

It seems like the tags are not updated in the database, but only in the
UI where the update is done independently of database. Do you see some
error messages in the minibuffer when you change the tags? For example:

A Xapian exception occurred opening database: Unable to get write lock on .... : already locked
 
> Changing tags from the search results view or the command line works 
> fine, even though it is slow (I think this is caused by that Xapian bug 
> I saw some references to). Adding and removing tags in the message view 
> is however instantaneous (although ineffective), which seems to indicate 
> that Xapian was not called (or incorrectly).

You can check which commands are invoked from emacs UI by having this
script

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
#!/bin/sh
echo "$@" >> /tmp/notmuch-ui.log
notmuch "$@"
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

and running emacs like

emacs --eval '(setq notmuch-command "/path/to/the/script")'

The commands invoked by the UI can be found in /tmp/notmuch-ui.log.
Check whether the tagging commands work if you run them manually.

 
> I'm using the latest version from the git repository (although I tried 
> 0.5 as well, without any difference). I'm on Mac OS with Cocoa Emacs 
> 23.2.1 (tried the console version as well). I also tried a pristine 
> Emacs configuration to remove interference with other Emacs packages, 
> but no such luck. Here's output from configure:
> 
> Checking for Xapian development files... Yes (1.0.15).

This seems to be quite old version of Xapian. I'm not aware of any API
incompatibilities in the versions, but you may try a newer version
(1.2.x).

-Michal