[PATCH] emacs: notmuch-show: remove extraneous shell quoting

[Matt Armstrong]

Tomi, thanks for your reply asking for some motivation behind this
patch.  I can't reply directly to your message because, for some reason,
it doesn't appear in my mailbox (I discovered your message while reading
the mail archive on notmuchmail.org).

The code dealing with this quoting issue was last touched in commit
b57d9635f50d5e9b53092218e81f6d2c391c363e, where Carl recognizes the
quoting is a bit of a hack and asks for a better fix.  This is my
attempt.

I am motivated by a concern for code health.  I saw the quoting, did not
understand it, recognized it as probably wrong, investigated how the
quotes were actually passed from Emacs to the shell, and still believed
it wrong.

I think this kind of flaw can be placed in the category of security fix.
Quoting issues often are.  But, I'm not a security person.

By my reasoning, the rationale for the change is simple:

a) It is the job of notmuch elisp to pass call-process the args in an
appropriate manner for notmuch-command (which is always a local
command).  Because call-process takes a list of strings, and no shell is
involved, using shell quotes is wrong.  It just so happens that Xapian
ignores the quotes, but taking advantage of that is not a great thing.

b) If notmuch-command is doing something fancy, as is the case with the
"remote" script on https://notmuchmail.org/remoteusage/, it is the job
of that script to quote its own args properly for ssh.  It looks like it
already does this.

So, the quoting is unnecessary on both accounts.


Matt Armstrong <marmstrong at google.com> writes:

> Remove shell quoting from notmuch-show--build-buffer.  The args list
> is ultimately passed to call-process, which passes them verbatim to
> the subprocess (typically, notmuch).  The quoting, intended for a
> shell, is unnecessary and confusing.