Thanks for the nmbug-status program

[W. Trevor King]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 11:01:09PM -0700, Carl Worth wrote:
> W. Trevor King writes:
> >> > I think that making nmbug and nmbug-status generally applicable
> >> > for other projects is a good target.  I don't see any need to
> >> > pull them out into a stand-alone project to do that though.
> >> 
> >> For what it's worth, I don't disagree.
> >
> > Does that mean your patches are aimed upstream at the notmuch
> > repository?
> 
> I didn't really intend them that way. What I meant was that I'd be
> happy to switch to a script within the notmuch repository if it did
> what I wanted, (which is basically just "create an HTML file from a
> notmuch query").

So, “here's a goal to shoot for, and I'm happy with my fork.  If
someone else wants to land patches like these upstream, I'm also happy
dropping my fork.” ;).  I think it would be easier to just mail your
patches to the list and see what sticks.

> > (or their shell's approriate environment variable syntax), and I'd
> > version the config file in the same repo as the associated tags.  I
> > don't see the point of keeping the config file somewhere else, when
> > you'll already need a repository to store the tags.
>
> Ah, then you've missed something different about my usage. I don't
> have any repository storing tags. My tags exist only in my notmuch
> database.

I had missed that, thanks for clarifying.  I still like the
config-from-repository-branch functionality because nmbug tag
repositories are part of the nmbug-status ecosystem, but I agree that
you shouldn't need a tag repository if you don't want to collaborate
on tag maintenance.

> > * d456390 Add a comment describing the program
> >
> > I like the idea, but I'd prefer a docstring just after the leading
> > comment.  Then we could reuse the docstring as the description for
> > the ArgumentParser.
> 
> Sure. That's better.

Would you like to write that up?

> > * 336411f Add "notmuch search" to the advertised queries.
> >
> > Folks can already copy-paste the terms into Emacs etc.  You only
> > need the 'notmuch search' prefix if you're pasting into a shell,
> > in which case you'll also want to escape shell-sensitive
> > characters like parenthesis.  I'm fine without this one.
> 
> This is more about advertising notmuch to people not familiar with
> it. It's more important for something like "mesa stable queue" than
> it is for the notmuch bug list, of course.

That makes sense, but I'd prefer something like:

  <p>This view is generated from the following
    <a href="http://notmuchmail.org/searching/">Notmuch query</a>:
  </p>
  <p>
    <code>
  view['query-string']
    </code>
  </p>

That name-drops Notmuch without implying that the whole thing is
copy-pastable into a shell.  Neither your queries [1] nor our
nmbug-status queries [2] use parens at the moment, but the current
master's example config does [3].

> > * 396869c Add support for a --query option (along with a default configuration)
> >
> > I don't have an opinion about this one ;).  The default config doesn't
> > look very useful (especially with it's dummy metadata settings), but
> > I'd only be using the in-Git-config approach, and I don't mind if
> > others want something like this.
> 
> This is about making this script self-documenting.
> 
> When I first tried nmbug-status I got just a stack trace[*], not even a
> usage message.

Heh, that should probably be fixed ;).  There's a nice example config
at devel/nmbug/status-config.json, but something that's bound more
tightly to the script itself seems useful.

> Even after running "nmbug-status --help" I wasn't any closer to
> knowing how to run the thing. It wasn't obvious that --config was
> the option I needed to get things to work, (from the stack trace,
> clearly this script wants some git repository somewhere), and even
> if I had know that --config was what I wanted, I had no idea how to
> construct a config file.

I hadn't understood that your built-in config was more of a
teaser/seed for new users, it makes more sense in that light.  I'd
prefer a clearer error message when we can't find a config file (I'm
working up a patch now ;), and documentation for the config file
format in 'nmbug-status --help' (where it's clearly static assistence
for unfamiliar users).

Cheers,
Trevor

[1]: http://cworth.org/~cworth/mesa-stable-queue/
[2]: http://nmbug.tethera.net/status/
[3]: http://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch/blob/40dc79d6ac828bc24ae1ec797aa50e53fc455621:/devel/nmbug/status-config.json#l65

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