[PATCH v2 08/10] cli: add insert --must-index option

[Peter Wang]

On Wed, 09 Jul 2014 20:20:17 -0300, David Bremner <david at tethera.net> wrote:
> Peter Wang <novalazy at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > This option causes notmuch insert to fail (with exit code 3) on failure
> > to index the message, or failure to set the tags on the message, or if
> > closing (flushing) the database fails.  Failure to sync tags to flags
> > has no effect.
> 
> I don't really understand why it's OK to ignore failure to sync
> flags. Can you explain? Or point to a previous discussion if we already
> went through this?

It wasn't really discussed.  Only Mark expressed that he didn't really
mind in id:87hadtxfrr.fsf at qmul.ac.uk

It might be justified that, unlike a failure to index, the message will
still be found though the notmuch interface, with the tags intact.
Running notmuch new will not lose those tags either (I think).
It's only when you view the message through another interface that there
will be an inconsistency in the small subset of tags which can be mapped
to maildir flags.

If we were strict about failure to sync flags, then presumably the
newly-added message would need to be deleted from disk and removed from
the database.  I'm not sure it's worthwhile to avoid that (minor)
inconsistency.

Peter