nbook: a notmuch based address book written in python

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi Patrick,

Sorry for the very late reply; I got distracted with some personal
matters.

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 11:44:57AM +0100, Patrick Totzke wrote:
> Hey Suvayu, welcome to notmuch!
> 
> I hope you are aware that there are already a few search based abook tools
> around for notmuch (listed in the wiki, albeit hidden in the emacs docs):
> http://notmuchmail.org/emacstips/#index14h2
> I personally use nottoomuch-addresses.sh, which apparently does some advanced
> caching voodoo for speed.
> 

I wasn't aware of either of them, thanks for pointing them out.  I'll
take a look for inspiration and ideas.

> But to your tool; practice test:
> I wasn't able to use wildcards or simply prefixes of names. This is essential
> if you want to use it for tabcompleting contacts in a MUA.

Since the idea was inspired by the completion on the Gmail web
interface, I already do a partial search so wildcards should not be
necessary.

> The time lookups take seems to depend on how many matches there are:
> 
> -------------------------------
> time nbook Suvayu
> 1 unique email addresses found for `Suvayu'
> fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com     Suvayu Ali
> 
> nbook Suvayu  0.04s user 0.01s system 95% cpu 0.050 total
> -------------------------------
> time nbook Justus
> ...
> 
> nbook Justus  0.21s user 0.07s system 11% cpu 2.484 total
> -------------------------------

Yes, I noticed this too when I searched for the more common names.  Not
sure how to get around this though.

> And If I look for my own name, this takes over a minute,
> eventually dying. This could be an issue with libnotmuch though.
> Possibly, your algorithm takes very long and then reads from an initially
> opened Database object again, which was invalidated by concurrent writes of other processes..
> 
> -------------------------------
> [~] time nbook Patrick                     
> 
> Error opening /home/pazz/mail/gmail/[Google Mail].All Mail/cur/1330682270_0.12958.megatron,U=8766,FMD5=66ff6a8bc18a8a3ac4b311daa93d358a:2,S: Too many open files
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/home/pazz/bin/nbook", line 167, in <module>
>   File "/home/pazz/bin/nbook", line 71, in __init__
>   File "/home/pazz/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/notmuch/message.py", line 233, in get_header
> notmuch.errors.NullPointerError
> Error in sys.excepthook:
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apport_python_hook.py", line 66, in apport_excepthook
> ImportError: No module named fileutils
> 
> Original exception was:
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "/home/pazz/bin/nbook", line 167, in <module>
>   File "/home/pazz/bin/nbook", line 71, in __init__
>   File "/home/pazz/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/notmuch/message.py", line 233, in get_header
> notmuch.errors.NullPointerError
> nbook Patrick  3.20s user 5.47s system 12% cpu 1:11.65 total
> ------------------------------------
> 

Yes someone else pointed this out too.  Again I'm not sure how to
proceed here.  I had a quick look at this last week and it seemed to me
the limitation comes from within the python bindings for notmuch.  Do
you have any ideas?

> Anyway, have fun hacking notmuch! If you are looking for a related project to bring in your python skills
> I could think of one or two :D

That would be wonderful.  To give you my background, I'm a graduate
student in physics and I have to do a lot of C/C++ and python
programming for my research.  Contributing to FOSS projects seems like a
wonderful way to learn to collaborate and clean programming (we
physicists tend to be sloppy programmers :-p).

> Best,
> /p

Cheers,

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.