Experimental Tag Sharing

[David Bremner]

On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:44:56 -0700, Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins at finestructure.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 13:45:06 -0300, David Bremner <david at tethera.net> wrote:
> 
> These patches did not apply cleanly for me from the list.  I was able to
> get them from bremner's "nmbug" branch [0], though.
> [0] git://pivot.cs.unb.ca/git/notmuch

I did resend the one patch that we figured out was corrupted, but for
the moment I will just rebase the nmbug branch that jrollins mentioned.

> > $ nmbug dump
> > $ cd $HOME/.nmbug && git add tags && git commit
[snip]

> Could they be merged into a single operation?

Yes, "commit" now (in my git repo) does both the dump and the git
commit.

> While I think having a central shared tag repo is ok to get started, I
> would really like to see this work in a distributed way.

So far I don't see any technical issues with working in a distributed
way, just social ones. Whatever organization we set up, I think it is
important for there to be a way to submit and manage bug reports for
"outsiders". Of course, requiring a notmuch install is already a burden.

> It might be nice to let the user configure what prefix they use
> (ie. what goes before the "::" (currently "notmuch")).

There are two simple-matters-of-programming here. One is how to do the
configuration; probably "nmbug config" can be an alias for "git config
nmbug.$1" or something. The other is translating between prefixes.
Neither is hard, I guess.

> Does this system support the removing of tags?  I guess I need to see
> the documentation for the restore --match option...

Yes, barring bugs, removing a tag in notmuch and running "nmbug commit"
should remove from the files in ~/.nmbug/tags

> It's too bad there's not a way to do scoped tag searches in notmuch
> (ie. notmuch search tag:"notmuch::*").  Any idea how hard it would be to
> support something like that?

I don't know. Carl thought it should work, but it doesn't seem to. 
My uneducated guess is it has something to do with query parsing.

> > On think I'm not sure about is how to handle ideas like "voting", and
> > "signing off" with tags. I suspect we can come up with some

> What issue are you trying to solve here?  Whatever it is, I don't think
> I like enumerating tags as the solution.

I'm trying to handle the issue of sharing non-boolean data. 
For example, 
 - how can we record priorities bugs/patches
 - how can we conveniently find all of the emacs patches (b.t.w I
   started using notmuch::emacs for those) that jrollins has endorsed
   but are not pushed.

Of course, nmbug could share more metadata than tags. OTOH I'd like to
avoid completely reinventing a distributed [0] bug tracker.

David


[0] well, at least potentially distributed, depending on definitions.





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