notmuch Digest, Vol 20, Issue 57

[Mark Anderson]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:53:30 -0700, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:38:30 -0600, Mark Anderson <ma.skies at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I had briefly considered adding another output format "file", just to get a
> > single file for each message in the db, but the file/files distinction
> > feels a bit niggling.  Perhaps it should be changed to "files" and
> > "filelists" or something else more clear.
> 
> Another option that would be general to several commands would be:
> 
> 	notmuch search --output=files --exclude-duplicates
> 
> Or alternately, --include-duplicates. That might be more useful for
> "notmuch show" which is a case where users have previously asked for the
> ability to ask for duplicate messages, (and where the duplicates are
> squelched by default).
> 
> Thoughts?

I personally prefer --output=files remain as it was, with one file per
mail (even though I submitted the patch to change it).  I suggest that
we could add another format to supply all files (perhaps
--output=allfiles, or --output=dupfiles).  I don't like my original
suggestion of "filelists" because it implies a list of lists to me.  A
list of lists would correlate better to the number of messages which
match the search terms, but doesn't correlate well to xargs input.

I understand that we could use --include-duplicates, but I don't think
there are currently any output specifers that actually have a plurality
for a single message.  If we had something like --output=from, or some
other message attribute, then I think we would achieve more useful
orthogonality from adding an argument similar to --include-duplicates.

As it stands, it looks better to me to have a different --output
specifier to represent the uncommon case of multiple outputs per search
match.

-Mark