[RFC PATCH v5 00/11] Add NOTMUCH_MESSAGE_FLAG_EXCLUDED flag

[Austin Clements]

Quoth Jameson Graef Rollins on Feb 15 at  2:16 pm:
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:11:15 +0000, Mark Walters <markwalters1009 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think the difficulty is that there are lots of annoying corner cases,
> > but if there is a  simpler solution that would be great!
> 
> I think there is!

There's been a fair bit of discussion of this at
id:"871uqvgrnm.fsf at qmul.ac.uk" (already pointed out on IRC, but I
figured I'd point it out here for others).

There are some drawbacks to separating out the exclude flag, but
personally I think they're minor and that doing so opens up a lot of
interesting UI possibilities as well as providing a very clean and
consistent interface.

> > 1) What should notmuch show id:deleted-message-id do? 
> > 
> > It could return the thread containing the deleted message. If it does
> > return a thread what subject does it assign it?  Possibly it could
> > return no messages and the caller would have to call it again with
> > --no-exclude.
> 
> "notmuch show id:<excluded-id>" should always return the message
> matching id:<excluded-id> with match=true.  In fact, any search that
> references a specific id: should always process the message as if there
> were no excludes at all.

This sounds terribly inconsistent to me.  Even setting that aside, I
can't think of a reasonable way to implement this.  What does it mean
for a search to reference a specific id?  Do you special case when the
query begins with the string "id:"?  Do you parse the query?  Do you
check if the unexcluded search matches exactly one message and do
something different in that case?