ANNOUNCE: muchsync 1 - share notmuch DB across machines

[Suvayu Ali]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 02:55:19PM -0700, David Mazieres wrote:
> Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > I noticed that the configure script didn't notice notmuch-devel was not
> > installed on my system.  I noticed it when the compilation failed.  Bug?
> 
> What OS and distribution are you using?  notmuch-devel sounds like
> something a linux distribution might do, rather than anything that's
> part of notmuch itself.  On arch linux, for example, there's just a
> notmuch package that includes notmuch.
> 
> Obviously there's no way to compile muchsync without notmuch installed.
> But if you elaborate on what it is you saw and what you would like to
> see I might be able to address it in the next release.

Sorry, I wasn't specific.  I'm on Fedora.  On Fedora, packages are split
into runtime dependencies and build dependencies.  So installing notmuch
will give you the notmuch binary as well as libnotmuch.  Whereas if you
want to compile, the you install notmuch-devel to get the headers.

When I ran the configure script, it failed couple of times.  The first
time it could not find sqlite headers, the second time I was missing
libcrypto related headers.  I installed sqlite-devel and openssl-devel
to resolve these.  The configure script succeeded after this, when it
should have failed since the notmuch headers were missing.  I realised
it when compilation failed.  Installing notmuch-devel resolved this.

> > Besides that, I had a question.  I would like to synchronize just the
> > tags, not the maildirs, I want to use OfflineIMAP for that.  Is that
> > possible?
> 
> Not really, no.  You could run offlineimap followed by muchsync, but you
> run the risk that mail will be delivered in the meantime.  You could
> also run offlineimap to fetch your mail in the first place, and then
> muchsync to sync it between your devices.
> 
> Can I ask why you would want to do this, anyway?  Muchsync should be
> faster than notmuch, particularly if you have a lot of mail directories
> and/or are going to pay the cost of tag synchronization anyway.

I don't quite have a very reliable connection between my server &
laptop.  So I prefer to download my emails from the source, Gmail, at
both locations.  I usually read and respond to emails from my laptop,
but I do use the server sometimes.  So I only need to synchronise the
tags.  I also keep the server around to synchronize a few more maildirs,
the ones I read irregularly and would prefer does not occupy valuable
disk space on my laptop.

Cheers,

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.