feature request: fetch missing keys in the background

[Antoine Beaupré]

Hi!

Because I have a rather large keyring, fetching new keys or refreshing
old ones takes a long time. When I click on the red red button saying
"Unknown key ID [...] or unsupported algorithm", Emacs freezes for a
good 90 seconds. Considering I use that editor^Wvirtual machine for
nearly everything, it's quite annoying and sends me off browsing the web
in Firefox forever. I end up having a horde of shaven yaks and then
finally remember that I had that key update, by which time I had
forgotten what I was doing reading email in the first place, let alone
what I was doing *before* opening my inbox...

So. It would be great if Notmuch would run those key updates
asynchronously. I am not sure how that would work: as Bremner said on
IRC, it might make it difficult to update the button automatically. But
I don't mind that: I can refresh the page myself. He suggested running
things in the background when clicking with a prefix (C-u?) but I would
argue that freezing Emacs is just a no-no in general.

I couldn't find directly what function was called behind that button:
"C-h k" just says it's, obviously, `push-button'. Bremner says it might
be `notmuch-crypto-sigstatus-good-callback' which looks reasonable. I'm
only a junior elisp programmer, but it seems to me the
`notmuch-show-refresh-view' call there could be an asynchronous callback
to an async `make-process' call, as opposed to `call-process', which is
synchronous.

But I'd like others to chime in here: is this something that would be
accepted? Would the above work?

A.

-- 
If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't
understood it yet.
                       - Niels Bohr