[PATCH v2 06/10] cli: Introduce "notmuch address" command

[Michal Sojka]

On Wed, Nov 05 2014, Mark Walters wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Nov 2014, Michal Sojka <sojkam1 at fel.cvut.cz> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 04 2014, Mark Walters wrote:
>>> On Mon, 03 Nov 2014, Michal Sojka <sojkam1 at fel.cvut.cz> wrote:
>>>> This moves address-related functionality from search command to the
>>>> new address command. The implementation shares almost all code and
>>>> some command line options.
>>>>
>>>> Options --offset and --limit were intentionally not included in the
>>>> address command, because they refer to messages numbers, which users
>>>> do not see in the output. This could confuse users because, for
>>>> example, they could see more addresses in the output that what was
>>>> specified with --limit. This functionality can be correctly
>>>> reimplemented for addresses later.
>>>
>>> I am not sure about this: we already have this anomaly for output=files
>>> say. Also I can imagine calling notmuch address --limit=1000 ... to get
>>> a bunch of recent addresses quickly and I really am wanting to look at
>>> 1000 messages, not collect 1000 addresses.
>>
>> I think that one of the reasons for having the new "address" command is
>> to have cleaner user interface. And including "anomalies" doesn't sound
>> like a way to achieve this. I think that now you can use "date:" query
>> to limit the search.
>>
>> I volunteer to implement "address --limit" properly after 0.19. This
>> should be easy.
>
> I think this depends on how you view limit: is it to limit the output
> (roughly to run "head" on the output), or is to bound the amount of work
> notmuch has to do (eg to make sure you don't get a long delay). Your
> suggestion is definitely the former, whereas I am more worried about the
> latter: limit in your definition could take an essentially unbounded
> amount of time.

Why? If I understand you correctly, you think of limit in terms of
messages. There is 1:N mapping between messages and addresses, where
N >= 1. If I limit the number of printed addresses, I limit the number
of messages as well. Only if N is zero (which probably can be the case
with Bcc and --output=recipients) then it can result in unbounded work
(provided you have infinite number of Bcc only messages in your
database :-)).

Do I miss something?

-Michal