"search --path=directory/" is lame(-ish)

[David Edmondson]

On Wed, Oct 29 2014, Jani Nikula wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2014, David Edmondson <dme at dme.org> wrote:
>> Adding a terminal slash to a directory name when using --path causes the
>> search to fail. Removing the terminal slash produces results.
>
> I think you mean path:, not --path.

Yes, sorry.

> Anyway, the reason for this behaviour is that the path components are
> indexed as boolean terms, not unlike tags, just with a different
> namespace. It's all parsed in Xapian, not in Notmuch. Adding the /
> variants would mean indexing twice the amount of terms.

Could we always prune a trailing slash from the path: component of a
query before using it?

>> Given that many shells will add the terminal slash during completion,
>> this is lame(-ish).
>
> Given that path: expects a relative path from the maildir root, not just
> any path, and the notmuch bash completion script (if you happen to use
> bash) does exactly this, without adding the slash, I'm not too worried.

I'm almost always doing this in Emacs shell-mode, manipulating the
pathnames on the fly. This means that I can adapt, of course.