[PATCH] config: Expand ~ to $HOME

[Bijan Chokoufe Nejad]

On 16-05-09, Tomi Ollila wrote:
> On Sun, May 08 2016, Bijan Chokoufe <bijan at chokoufe.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi Tomi,
> >
> > Thanks for your detailled review. Please see questions below.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Bijan
> >
> > Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila at iki.fi> schrieb am So., 8. Mai 2016 um 18:47 Uhr:
> >
> >> On Sun, May 08 2016, Bijan Chokoufe Nejad <bijan at chokoufe.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Very useful in case you want to keep your .notmuch-config synchronized
> >> across
> >> > machines where you have different user names.
> >>
> >> Thank you for your interest in improving notmuch!
> >>
> >> There are a few things that needs to be sorted out for this feature to be
> >> good:
> >>
> >> This implementation does not handle ~user/ prefix: i.e. home directory of
> >> 'user' (maybe this should not, but it should handle the case).
> >
> > I don't get it. Is '~user" an alternative to '~'?
> 
> ~user is ~ in case you're 'user' -- except that now that I think of it
> ~user could read home directory from /etc/passwd and not using $HOME.
> If you're 'eve', then ~alice should definitely be different than ~

OK I see. I never used ~user instead of ~ and don't see any advantage in using
~user but good to know it's there.

> 
> >
> >> Whether or not ~user is handled, it should check that slash (/) follows...
> >>
> >>
> > So I guess you aim at the case where someone sets `path=~`? On the other
> > hand why is this checking not necessary in the "normal" case where no
> > expanding of `~` is done? Or is it maybe already handled in
> > `lib/database.cc`. Just to be clear I tested that it works currently with
> > `path=~/.mail`.
> 
> your code checked that path[0] == '~', but nothing else, e.g.
> 
> ~123randomstuff/... would expand as /home/user23randomstuff/... 
> 
> ... and you have good point path being set as single '~' !
> 
> >> IIRC there is some ready-made implementations of the above -- but if not,
> >> one option is to check how (expand-file-name) works in emacs for reference.
> >>
> >>
> > Well there is wordexp (http://linux.die.net/man/3/wordexp) but I wasn't
> > sure if I should use it. The getenv just seemed simpler but maybe it is
> > necessary.
> 
> For the time being we could simply do checking that path[0] == '~' and
> path[1] == '/' and then do expansion based on getenv ("HOME") -- and
> comment that ~any_user is just not supported there.

alright, done. I am still a bit confused by the way you do pull request here.
I am attaching the rebased commit as git patch. Is this correct or should I use
git send-email again? How do you keep track of lengthy PRs with this workflow?

Cheers,
Bijan

> 
> From testing point of view doing one positive test which ensures that when
> HOME is a string pointing to valid directory (and does not end with
> trailing slash as it usually is) and path in configuration starts with '~/'
> (and does not have multiple slashes following) works as expected...
> 
> (as a special case, from softare functionality point I don't see problem
> setting path=~/ but from usability point that might not be the best -- but
> some users may have peculiar preferences... ;D)
> 
> Tomi
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: v2-0001-config-Expand-to-HOME.patch
Type: text/x-diff
Size: 1262 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/attachments/20160509/d13a25b3/attachment.patch>