[PATCH v3] emacs: Use the minibuffer for CLI error reporting

[Mark Walters]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2013, Austin Clements <amdragon at MIT.EDU> wrote:
> We recently switched to popping up a buffer to report CLI errors, but
> this was too intrusive, especially for transient errors and especially
> since we made fewer things ignore errors.  This patch changes this to
> display a basic error message in the minibuffer (using Emacs' usual
> error handling path) and, if there are additional details, to log
> these to a separate error buffer and reference the error buffer from
> the minibuffer message.  This is more in line with how Emacs typically
> handles errors, but makes the details available to the user without
> flooding them with the details.
>
> Given this split, we pare down the basic message and make it more
> user-friendly, and also make the verbose message even more detailed
> (and more debugging-oriented).
> ---
>
> This version fixes two hard-coded paths in the tests.


This version looks good to me but I have one query we may like to
consider. 

At the moment notmuch-call-notmuch-process returns the stderr mixed with
stdout and we might like to separate that out (particularly as the error
message lists stderr and stdout separately and in this case it all gets
called stdout).

I attach a patch that does this: I am not really familiar with this so I
just took Austin's code from notmuch-call-notmuch-json.

Austin: obviously feel free to fold this into your patch if you think
appropriate.

Best wishes

Mark

>From b73395c8efb57111bd4de281797004747de6c2ed Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Mark Walters <markwalters1009 at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2013 22:25:02 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] tweak notmuch-call-notmuch-process

---
 emacs/notmuch.el |   10 +++++++---
 1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/emacs/notmuch.el b/emacs/notmuch.el
index c98a4fe..4f7ee2c 100644
--- a/emacs/notmuch.el
+++ b/emacs/notmuch.el
@@ -540,9 +540,13 @@ If notmuch exits with a non-zero status, output from the process
 will appear in a buffer named \"*Notmuch errors*\" and an error
 will be signaled."
   (with-temp-buffer
-    (let ((status (apply #'call-process notmuch-command nil t nil args)))
-      (notmuch-check-exit-status status (cons notmuch-command args)
-				 (buffer-string)))))
+    (let ((err-file (make-temp-file "nmerr")))
+      (unwind-protect
+	  (let ((status (apply #'call-process
+			       notmuch-command nil (list t err-file) nil args)))
+	    (notmuch-check-exit-status status (cons notmuch-command args)
+				       (buffer-string) err-file))
+	(delete-file err-file)))))
 
 (defun notmuch-search-set-tags (tags &optional pos)
   (let ((new-result (plist-put (notmuch-search-get-result pos) :tags tags)))
-- 
1.7.9.1