[PATCH v2] emacs: bad regexp @ `notmuch-search-process-filter'

[Pieter Praet]

On Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:05:32 -0400, Austin Clements <amdragon at MIT.EDU> wrote:
> Quoth Pieter Praet on Jul 11 at 10:43 pm:
> > TL;DR: I can haz regex pl0x?
> 
> Oof, what a pain.  I'm happy to change the output format of search; I
> hadn't realized how difficult it would be to parse.  In fact, I'm not
> sure it's even parsable by regexp, because the message ID's themselves
> could contain parens.
> 
> So what would be a good format?  One possibility would be to
> NULL-delimit the query part; as distasteful as I find that, this part
> of the search output isn't meant for user consumption.  Though I fear
> this is endemic to the dual role the search output currently plays as
> both user and computer readable.
> 
> I've also got the code to do everything using document ID's instead of
> message ID's.  As a side-effect, it makes the search output clean and
> readily parsable since document ID's are just numbers.  Hence, there
> are no quoting or escaping issues (plus the output is much more
> compact).  I haven't sent this to the list yet because I haven't had a
> chance to benchmark it and determine if the performance benefits make
> exposing document ID's worthwhile.

Jamie Zawinski once said/wrote [1]:
  'Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know,
  I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.'

With this in mind, I set out to get rid of this whole regex mess altogether,
by populating the search buffer using Notmuch's JSON output instead of doing
brittle text matching tricks.

Looking for some documentation, I stumbled upon a long-forgotten gem [2].

David's already done pretty much all of the work for us!

Unfortunately, it doesn't apply cleanly to master anymore.

David, would you mind rebasing it?


Peace

-- 
Pieter

[1] http://www.jwz.org/hacks/
[2] id:"1290777202-14040-1-git-send-email-dme at dme.org"