folder and path completely broken in HEAD?

[Jani Nikula]

On Sat, 03 May 2014, dm-list-email-notmuch at scs.stanford.edu wrote:
> Mark Walters <markwalters1009 at gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> All the way back.  Now you are saying there will be no convenient way to
>>> match just the "mail.class" part without the year?  How very
>>> distressing.  Ugh.
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> I am not quite sure what you are meaning by hierarchically group
>> messages. Searching for path:dir/foo/bar/** should give all messages in
>> all directories beneath dir/foo/bar. 
>
> The problem is that the maildir++ spec disallows such pathnames.  If I
> need compatibility with maildir++ (for instance for an imap server), at
> least on a per-year basis, then my maildirs have to have names like:
>
>    2013/.foo.foo
>    2013/.foo.bar
>    2013/.foo.baz
>    2014/.foo.foo
>    2014/.foo.bar
>    2014/.foo.baz
>
> So if I want a way to aggregate all my foo mail in a single search,
> right now I just ask for folder:foo.  Will there be any equivalent in
> the new notmuch?

Given that we're in feature freeze and ready for an imminent release of
0.18, I think it's pretty safe to say, no.

---

It's not going to help you, but I'll mention a few of the issues the old
folder: search had, which we also had complaints about, and which would
have been quite hard to fix while preserving the behaviour you want. In
short, we considered the old folder: search broken.

Given layout:

	Foo/{cur,new}
	foo/{cur,new}
	fooing/{cur,new}
	bar/foo/{cur,new}
	cur
	new

It was impossible to refer to the top level folder.

It was impossible to refer to foo without also referring to Foo, fooing,
and bar/foo.

In your layout, if you also had 2013/.bar.foo, folder:foo would match
that as well. To not match that, you would have to include each
folder:.foo.xxx in the search.


BR,
Jani.