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[Jani Nikula]

On Sun, 27 Apr 2014, Sam Halliday <sam.halliday at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have just started using notmuch and I really love it! I've been using
> web interfaces and proprietary mail clients for almost a decade and mutt
> before that (because I never got on well with rmail or gnus). Now, I'm
> trying to get all my life-hacker aficionados to follow suit.

Great, glad you like it!

> I was wanting to submit an RFE for you and to browse your source code to
> see how hard it would be to implement, but I was disappointed that it is
> all hosted on your own git repository with no issue tracker.

You can browse the source code online at [1], and see the issues and
patches tracked at [2] (details at [3]). When you're developing an email
tool, all the problems start looking like email. You've just submitted
an issue by writing email. ;)

[1] http://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch
[2] http://nmbug.tethera.net/status/
[3] http://notmuchmail.org/nmbug/

> While I appreciate that you probably use notmuch as your work flow
> manager, it is also quite common to use a social website such as github
> or getsatisfaction to interface with users. In my experience, github
> dramatically increases the number of contributions from users, in the
> form of what github calls "pull requests" (if you're a git user but not
> a github user, the term is confusing).

Unsurprisingly, we use mailing list based review of patches contributed
by email, and tracked similar to the issues. (The Notmuch Emacs
interface is rather well suited for handling emailed patches.)
Personally I don't think github pull requests would sit well with the
review work flow. We also maintain fairly high standards for the
contributions we accept, so the review has a significant role in the
process.

> Would it be possible to have a github project for notmuch? I'm certain
> the git repositories could be synchronised easily.

This part is trivial, but on its own it doesn't provide any obvious
benefits.

> A bridge between github's issue tracker and notmuch would be entirely
> possible: they have an API that would allow addition and removal of
> tags, as well as editing tickets. Actually, I would probably use such a
> thing :-)

I'm sure all of this would be entirely possible; I'm not so sure it
would be worth the effort. But hey, if someone is willing to do the
work, patches are welcome. By email. ;)


BR,
Jani.