notmuch's idea of concurrency / failing an invocation

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hallo!

Stepping away from the current code base -- what is notmuch's original
idea of concurrency?  That is, all of us probably know that one:

    A Xapian exception occurred opening database: Unable to get write
      lock on /home/thomas/Mail-schwinge.name-thomas/.notmuch/xapian:
      already locked

I recently saw that one while using the Emacs UI (that one tried to
remove a unread tag or similar), and in parallel a delivery to the
notmuch DB was going on.

Apparently the DB we're using doesn't allow for simultaneous writing
(even though it can't even possibly have been dangerous in this case).

Which is the original idea here?  Is it that...

  * each and every client should catch these kinds of errors, and retry,
    or eventually give up at some point, and report the status to the
    user; or is it that...

  * notmuch internally should catch these concurrency cases, and retry,
    or eventually give up at some point (``notmuch --maximum-wait=30s tag
    [...]''), and fail as seen above?

This one is an obvious temporary error due to a concurrency situation.
Wouldn't the latter suggestion be preferable here?  I guess that in most
cases the DB isn't locked for long periods of time, and thus the
concurrency situation would decline quickly.


One difficulty I see is judging which errors are temporary and which are
permanent -- which is obvious in a lot of cases (concurrent DB access,
memory starved or any other OS resource), but may not be, for example in
case of I/O errors (is ``disk full'' a permanent error?).  And then, for
some of these cases, waiting does make sense (concurrent DB access, as
suggested above), and for other (temporary?) errors it doesn't make (a
lot of) sense (out of memory: only sensible thing is to abort, and have
the caller re-try, or disk full: waiting for some free space may be worth
it, or it may be not).


Grüße,
 Thomas
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