thread merge/split proposal
Daniel Kahn Gillmor
dkg at fifthhorseman.net
Mon Apr 4 11:23:43 PDT 2016
On Mon 2016-04-04 14:14:27 -0300, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> b) when an unjoin is requested, do a graph analysis of every message in
> the thread's In-Reply-To and References headers, and recreate
> distinct threads from the connected components.
[...]
> From the CLI, it would look something like:
>
> notmuch join-threads THREAD_A THREAD_B [ THREAD_C ... ]
> notmuch split-thread THREAD_X
On IRC, bremner pointed out two specific improvements to this proposal:
0) the inverse operation of "join" proposed above is distinct from the
ongoing discussion about splitting threads in arbitrary places. I
don't want to conflate these issues, so my proposed
connected-component-analysis operation should be "notmuch
unjoin-thread", and not "notmuch split-thread"
1) a "join" operation probably has to be stored explicitly in the
database, so that the threads will be re-joined across a
dump/restore operation.
I'm happy with both of these improvements.
for (1) i'd propose that the join operation would be implemented by
adding a new term type "join", which can be applied to any document.
Its value is the message-id of a message that *should* be "in-reply-to"
but wasn't.
So for example: messages A and B are in one thread; messages C and D
come in in a separate thread that should have been joined to the prior
thread but is not.
i propose implementing this as something like:
notmuch_message_add_term(message_c, "join", get_message_id(message_a));
notmuch_message_set_thread_id(message_c, get_thread_id(message_a));
notmuch_message_set_thread_id(message_d, get_thread_id(message_a));
i'd also add all the "join" terms to "notmuch dump", though i'm not sure
exactly how to extend the "notmuch dump" format.
feedback welcome,
--dkg
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