[PATCH 00/11] Add ghost messages and fix thread linking

[Tomi Ollila]

On Fri, Oct 03 2014, Austin Clements <aclements at csail.mit.edu> wrote:

> This series modifies our database representation of messages that have
> been referenced by other messages, but for which we don't have the
> message itself.  Currently, we store this information as Xapian
> metadata, but this has several downsides for performance and
> complexity and results in hard-to-fix thread linking bugs.  This patch
> series implements "ghost messages", which replace this Xapian metadata
> with Xapian documents that look and act very much like regular message
> documents, but simply have no content.  This simplifies and speeds up
> our thread linking algorithm and fixes the currently broken thread
> linking test.
>
> Ghost messages also open up interesting future possibilities, such as
> "pre-seeding" tags for messages that are not yet indexed.  This could
> be used to make notmuch insert simpler and more robust, as part of tag
> synchronization, and to improve nmbug's behavior when tags arrive
> before messages.

The code looks OK to me -- there are IMO some strange things but those
don't change the status quo -- I did look a little past the diffs into
the code to understand something...

I am now having these patches applied to my 'home' notmuch and haven't yet
seen anything strange there. In this setup I have 27 emails missing that
nmbug expects there to be -- let's see if I can get ghost messages there.

... and tests pass, ran while writing the above part...

I'll put these in use next week on one of my 'work' notmuch. There I have
seen a problem that while I am on one thread, 
`notmuch-poll-and-refresh-buffer' picks new mail but suddenly this thread
now has changed it's thread id :O -- making the search buffer go blank.
I'll see whether it still happens with these (may be totally unrelated)
and perhaps investigate further...


Tomi