[PATCH] NEWS: Add notes for (imminent) notmuch 0.6 release

Carl Worth cworth at cworth.org
Fri Jul 1 03:19:04 PDT 2011


By skimming through "git log 0.5..origin/release" late at
night. Hopefully everything here is accurate.
---

I've already pushed this out to master.

David, obviously this is intended to be cherry-picked over to the
release branch.

And everyone, please review what I've written and provide any
clarfications or corections necessary. Let me know if you think I've
included more detail than necessary or if I've missed anything
important.

Thanks,

-Carl


 NEWS |  344 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 files changed, 344 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index dae7832..d55453b 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -1,3 +1,347 @@
+Notmuch 0.6 (2011-07-XX)
+=======================
+New, general features
+---------------------
+Folder-based searching
+
+  Notmuch queries can now include a search term to match the
+  directories in which mail files are stored (within the mail
+  storage). The syntax is as follows:
+
+	folder:<path>
+
+  For example, one might use things such as:
+
+	folder:spam
+	folder:2011/06
+
+  or anything else that matches directories within your mail storage.
+
+  This feature is particularly useful for users of delivery-agent
+  software (such as procmail or maildrop) that is filtering mail and
+  delivering it to particular folders, or users of systems such as
+  Gmail that use filesystem directories to indicate message tags.
+
+  NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
+  notmuch will be searchable with folder: terms. In order to enable
+  this feature for all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be
+  rebuilt as follows:
+
+	notmuch dump > notmuch.dump
+	# Backup, then remove notmuch database ($MAIL/.notmuch)
+	notmuch new
+	notmuch restore notmuch.dump
+
+New, automatic tags: "signed" and "encrypted"
+
+  These tags will automatically be applied to messages containing
+  multipart/signed and multipart/encrypted parts.
+
+  NOTE: Only messages that are newly indexed with this version of
+  notmuch will receive these tags. In order to enable this feature for
+  all mail, the entire notmuch index will need to be rebuilt (see
+  above).
+
+New command-line features
+-------------------------
+Add new "notmuch show --verify" option for signature verification
+
+  This option instruct notmuch to verify the signature of
+  PGP/MIME-signed parts.
+
+Add new "notmuch show --decrypt" and "notmuch reply --decrypt" options
+
+  This option instructs notmuch to decrypt PGP/MIME-encrypted parts.
+
+Proper nesting of multipart parts in "notmuch show" output
+
+  MIME parts are now display with proper nesting to reflect original
+  MIME hierarchy of a message. This allows clients to correctly
+  analyze the MIME structure, (such as, for example, determining to
+  which parts a signature part applies).
+
+Add new "notmuch show --part" option
+
+  This is a replacement for the older "notmuch part" command, (which
+  is now deprecated—it should still work as always, but is no longer
+  documented). Putting part output under "notmuch show" allows for all
+  of the "notmuch show" options to be applied when extracting a single
+  part, (such as --format=json for extracting a message part with JSON
+  formatting).
+
+Deprecate "notmuch search-tags", (in favor of "notmuch search --output=tags *")
+
+  The "notmuch search-tags" sub-command has been redundant since the
+  addition of the --output=tags option to "notmuch search". We now
+  make that more clear by deprecating "notmuch search-tags", (dropping
+  it from the documentation). We do continue to support the old syntax
+  by translating it internally to the new call.
+
+Performance improvements
+------------------------
+Faster searches (by doing fewer serches to construct threads)
+
+  Whenever a user asks for search results as threads, notmuch first
+  performs a search for messages matching the query, then performs
+  additional searches to find other messages in the resulting threads.
+
+  Removing inefficiences and redundancies in these secondary searches
+  results in a measured speedups of 1.5x for a typical search.
+
+Faster searches (by doing fewer passes to gather message data)
+
+  Optimizing Xapian data access patterns (using a single pass to get
+  all message-document data rather than a ps for each data type)
+  results in a measured speedup of 1.7x for a typical search.
+
+  The benefits of this optimization combine with the preceding
+  optimization. With both in place, Austin Clements measured a speedup
+  of 2.5x for a search of all messages in his inbox (was 4.5s, now
+  1.8s). Thanks, Austin!
+
+Faster initial indexing
+
+  More efficient indexing of new messages results in a measured
+  speedup of 1.4x for the initial indexing of 3 GB of mail (1h 14m
+  rather than 1h 46m). Thanks to Austin Clements and Michal Sojka.
+
+Make "notmuch new" faster for unchanged directories
+
+  Optimizing to not do any further examinations of sub-directories
+  when the filesystem indicates that a directory is unchanged from the
+  last "notmuch new" results in measured speedups of 8.5 for the "No
+  new mail" case, (was 0.77s, now 0.09s). Thanks to Austin Clements
+  and Karel Zak.
+
+New emacs-interface features
+----------------------------
+Output of pipe command is now displayed if pipe command fails
+
+  This is extremely useful in the common use case of piping a patch to
+  "git am". If git fails to cleanly merge the patch the error messages
+  from the failed merge are now clearly displayed to the user, (where
+  previously they were silently hidden from the user).
+
+User-selectable From address
+
+  A user can choose which configured email addresses should be used as
+  the From address whenever composing a new message. To do so, simply
+  press C-u before the command which will open a new message. Emacs
+  will prompt for the from address to use.
+
+  The user can customize the "Notmuch Identities" setting in the
+  notmuch cutomize group in order to use addresses other than those in
+  the notmuch configuration file if desired.
+
+  The user can also choose to always be prompted for the from address
+  when composing a new message (without having to use C-u) by setting
+  the "Notmuch Always Prompt For Sender" option in the notmuch
+  customize group.
+
+Automatic detection and hiding of original message in top-posted message
+
+  When a message contains a line looking something like:
+
+	----- Original Message -----
+
+  emacs hides this and all subsequent lines as an "original message",
+  (allowing the user to click or press enter on the "original message"
+  button to display it again). This makes the handling of top-posted
+  citations work much like conventional citations.
+
+New hooks for running code when tags are modified
+
+  Some users want to perform additional actions whenever a particular
+  tag is added/removed from a message. This could be used to, for
+  example, interface with some external spam-recognition training
+  tool. T facilitate this, two new hooks are added which can be
+  modified in the following settings of the notmuch customize group:
+
+	Notmuch Before Tag Hook
+	Notmuch After Tag Hook
+
+New optional support for hiding some multipart/alternative parts
+
+  Many emails are sent with redundant content within a
+  multipart/alternative group (such as a text/plain part as well as a
+  text/html part). Users can configure the setting:
+
+	Notmuch Show All Multipart/Alternative Parts
+
+  to "off" in the notmuch customize group to have the interface
+  automatically hide some part alternatives (such as text/html
+  parts). This new part hiding is not configured by default yet
+  because there's not yet a simple way to re-display such a hidden
+  part if it is not actually redundant with a displayed part.
+
+Better rendering of text/x-vcalendar parts
+
+  These parts are now displayed in a format suitable for use with the
+  emacs diary.
+
+Avoid getting confused by Subject and Author fields with newline characters
+
+  Replacing all characters with ACII code less than 32 with a question mark.
+
+Cleaner display of From line in email messages (remove double quotes,
+and drop "name" if it's actually just a repeat of the email address).
+
+Vim interface improvements
+--------------------------
+Felipe Contreras provided a number of updates for the vim interface.
+
+  Using sendmail directly rather than mailx,
+
+  Implementing archive in show view
+
+  Add support to mark as read in show and search views
+
+  Add delete commands
+
+  Various cleanups.
+
+Bindings improvements
+---------------------
+Ruby bindings are now much more complete
+
+  Including QUERY.sort, QUERY.to_s, MESSAGE.maildir_flags_to_tags,
+  MESSAGE.tags_to_maildir_flags, and MESSAGE.get_filenames
+
+Python bindings are now much more complete
+
+  Including Message().get_filenames(),
+  Message().tags_to_maildir_flags(), Threads().__nonzero__,
+  Tags().__nonzero__()
+
+  Also implement Message.__cmp__ and __hash__
+  These allow, for example:
+
+	if msg1 == msg2
+
+  As well as set arithmetic on Messages():
+
+	s1, s2= msgs1, msgs2
+	s1.union(s2)
+	s2 -= s1
+
+Added initial Go bindings in bindings/go
+
+New build-system features
+-------------------------
+Added support for building in a directory other than the source directory
+
+  This can be used with the widely-supported idiom of simply running
+  the configure script from some other directory:
+
+	mkdir build
+	cd build
+	../configure
+	make
+
+Fix to save configure options for future, implicit runs of configure
+
+  When a user updates the source (such as with "git pull") calling
+  "make" may cause an automatic re-run of the configure script. When
+  this happens, the configure script will automatically be called with
+  the same options the user originally passed in the most-recent
+  manual invocation of configure.
+
+New test-suite feature
+----------------------
+Binary for bash for running test suite now located via PATH.
+
+  The notmuch test suite requires a fairly recent version of bash (>=
+  bash 4). As some systems supply an older version of bash at
+  /bin/bash, the test suite is now updated to search $PATH to locate
+  the bash binary. This allows users of systems with old /bin/bash to
+  simply install bash >= 4 somwhere on $PATH before /bin and then use
+  the test suite.
+
+Support for testing output with a trailing newline.
+
+  Previously, some tests would fail to notice a difference in the
+  presense/absence of a trailing newline in a program output, (which
+  has led to bugs in the past). Now, carefully-written tests (using
+  test_expect_equal_file rather than test_expect_equal) will detect
+  any change in the presence/absence of a trailing newline. Many tests
+  are updated to take advnatage of this.
+
+Avoiding accessing user's $HOME while running test suite
+
+  The test suite now carefully creates its own HOME directory. This
+  allows the test suite to be run with no existing HOME directory, (as
+  some build systems apparently do), and avoids test-suite differences
+  due to configuration files in the users HOME directory.
+
+
+General bug fixes
+-----------------
+Output *all* files for "notmuch search --output=files"
+
+  For the cases where multiple files have the same Message ID,
+  previous versions of notmuch would output only one such file. This
+  command is now fixed to correctly output all files.
+
+Fixed spurious search results from "overlapped" indexing of addresses
+
+  This fixed a bug where a search for:
+
+	to:user at elsewhere.com
+
+  would incorrectly match a message sent:
+
+	To: user at example,com, someone at elsewhere.com
+
+Fix --output=json when search has no results
+
+  A bug present since notmuch 0.4 had caused searches with no results
+  to produce an invalid json object. This is now fixed to cleanly
+  return a valid json object representing an empty array "[]" as
+  expected.
+
+fix the automatic detection of the From address for "notmuch reply"
+from the Received headers in some cases.
+
+Fix core dump on DragonFlyBSD due to -1 return value from
+sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX).
+
+Cleaned up several memory leaks
+
+Eliminated a few, rare segmentation faults and a double-free.
+
+Fix libnotmuch library to only export notmuch API functions
+
+  Previous release of the notmuch library also exported some Xapian
+  C++ exception type symbols. These were never part of the library
+  interface and were never intented to be exported.
+
+Emacs-interface bug fixes
+-------------------------
+Display any unexpected output or errors from "notmuch search" invocations
+
+  Previously any misformatted output or trailing error messages were
+  silently ignored. This output is now clearly displayed. This fix was
+  very helpful in identifying and fixing the bug decribed below.
+
+Fix bug where some threads would be missing from large search results
+
+  When a search returned a "large" number of results, the emacs
+  interface was incorrectly dropping one thread everytime the output
+  of the "notmuch search" process spanned the emacss read-buffer. This
+  is now fixed.
+
+Avoid rec-compression of .gz files (and similar) when saving attachment
+
+  Emacs was being too clever for its own good and trying to
+  re-compress pre-compressed .gz files when saving such attachments
+  (potentially corrupting the attachment). The emacs interface is
+  fixed to avoid this bug.
+
+Fix hiding of a message when a previously-hidden citation is visible
+
+  Previously the citation would remain visible in this case. This is
+  fixed so that hiding a message hides all parts.
+
 Notmuch 0.5 (2010-11-11)
 ========================
 New, general features
-- 
1.7.5.4



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