[PATCH] Automatically exclude tags in notmuch-show

[Mark Walters]

On Sun, 22 Jan 2012 13:16:09 -0500, Austin Clements <amdragon at MIT.EDU> wrote:
> Quoth myself on Jan 20 at 12:18 pm:
> > Quoth Mark Walters on Jan 20 at 12:10 am:
> > > 
> > > Ok Having said this is trivial I have found a problem. What should
> > > notmuch do if you do something like
> > > 
> > > notmuch show id:<some-id>
> > > and that message is marked with a deleted tag? To be consistent with the
> > > other cases (where a deleted message is in a matched thread) we might
> > > want to return the message with the not-matched flag set (eg in
> > > JSON). But my patch doesn't, as it never even sees the thread since it
> > > doesn't match.
> > > 
> > > Looking at notmuch-show.c I think we should not apply the exclude tags
> > > to do_show_single, but usually should apply it to do_show. One solution
> > > which is simple and is at least close to right would be to get do_show
> > > to return the number of threads found. If this is zero then retry the
> > > query without the excludes (possible setting the match_flag to zero on
> > > each message since we know it does not match)
> > > 
> > > This is not a completely correct solution as if you ask notmuch-show to
> > > show more than one thread it might  threads which only contain deleted
> > > messages.
> > > 
> > > I can't see other good possibilities without slowing down the normal
> > > path a lot (eg find all threads that match the original query and then
> > > apply the argument above).
> > > 
> > > Any thoughts?
> > 
> > Oh dear.
> > 
> > Well, here's one idea.  Instead of doing a single thread query in
> > show, do a thread query without the exclusions and then a message
> > query with the exclusions.  Output all of the messages from the first
> > query, but use the results of the second query to determine which
> > messages are "matched".  The same could be accomplished in the library
> > somewhat more efficiently, but it's not obvious to me what the API
> > would be.
> 
> Here's a slightly crazier idea that's more library-invasive than the
> original approach, but probably better in the long run.
> 
> Have notmuch_query_search_* return everything and make exclusion a
> message flag like NOTMUCH_MESSAGE_FLAG_MATCH.  Tweak the definition of
> "matched" to mean "matched and not excluded" (specifically, a message
> would have the match flag or the excluded flag or neither, but not
> both).  Search would skip threads with zero matched messages and I
> think show would Just Work.
> 
> I can think of two ways to implement this.  notmuch_query_search_*
> could perform both the original query and the query with exclusions
> and use the docid set from the second to compute the "excluded"
> message flag.  Alternatively, it could examine the tags of each
> message directly to compute the flag.  The latter is probably easier
> to implement, but probably slower.

I really like the idea of returning two flags. I think your first
suggestion works better for sorting reasons: we want to return a thread
which has a match-not-excluded message and also a match-excluded message
to be sorted based on the match-not-excluded message. Hence in
notmuch_query_search_threads we can create the list of docids to iterate
over as the list generated by query with exclusions followed by the list
without exclusions.  This list contains lots of messages twice but that
doesn't matter since we have to check whether we have already output
the message in an earlier thread anyway. 

Incidentally, it might not take very much more code to allow
notmuch_query_search_threads to take two arbitrary queries and return
all threads which match the first case but mark as matched those that
match the second: i.e. a step on the way towards "thread based and".

Best wishes

Mark