search conditions on siblings/parent/children in thread

[Michal Sojka]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2011, Gregor Kappler wrote:
> I am using notmuch for my mail and also for mailing lists.  For mailing
> lists it would be much more convenient to have a saved search displaying
> only replies to watched (say, tag:flagged) posts instead of the whole
> list.

Hi Gregor,

AFAIK this is not possible. I customized notmuch-search-line-faces to
highlight threads with flagged messages by different background color.
In the search window I still see the whole list, but the interesting
threads are highlighted so I can act on them differently.

> I did not find any way in notmuch to specify conditions on
> sibling/parent/children posts in a post's thread during search.
> 
> Does anybody use those searches?
> 
> Are there plans to include this feature?

There were some discussions about these kinds of searches but no patches
have been posted.
> 
> Sure, this feature would be very welcomed by me! Is there demand of
> other users?
> 
> If this is currently not possible, I do not know whether it is feasable
> with xapian: can xapian this kind of search and how it would perform.

I think that this kind of queries could be directly performed by Xapian
only if database schema is changed. However, we could probably implement
them directly in notmuch at the place where the list of the threads is
constructed. Custom query parser patches (sent recently by Austin
Clements) could probably help in this regard.

Cheers,
Michal