About the json output and the number of results shown.

[Christophe-Marie Duquesne]

Hi,

The notmuch command line tool has an option that seems very
interesting to me: --output=json

In several languages, and especially in python, json is as easy to parse as:
>>> res = json.load(stream)
If your stream contains valid json, you then get all your data in res
and you can immediately use it.

With notmuch, some commands can bring a lot of results, and can take
some time to return. That is why when I began to write a curse
interface to notmuch, I added a mechanism to spawn these commands in
background and gather the results asynchronously. Sadly, this makes me
unable to use the built-in python json parser: As long as the output
has not finished, the data on the stream is not valid json since it
lacks at least the closing bracket '}'. As a consequence, I find
easier not to use json and parse the data as it arrives.

So I am wondering: what is the point of having a tool that is able to
output json and ending in not using it? Is there a solution to make
the json output more useable? One solution I've been thinking about
would be to add an option: the range of results to show (something
like --range=25:50). Is it doable easily? I mean: if results are not
guaranteed to be in a given order, that would obviously be an issue.
Same if finding the results 25:50 is exactly as long as finding the
results 1:50. Otherwise, if it is doable, I guess this mail is a
feature request. In any case, do you have any proposal for making
sense of this json output without modifications in the notmuch CLI?

Cheers,
Christophe-Marie Duquesne