Hi guys,
Sorry for dropping off the mailing list after I sent my last patch series
(http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/2012/009470.html). I haven't had the
time or a stable enough email address to really follow notmuch development :)
I signed onto #notmuch a week or two ago and asked what I would need to do to
get a feature like this one into mainline. j4ni told me that he agreed with the
feedback to my original patch series, and suggested that I follow mjw1009's
advice of having filenames encode all information about mail storage
transparently, and that this would solve the problem with the original patch
series of sprinkling mail storage parameters all over the place. bremner
suggested that he had been thinking about how to support mbox or other
multiple-message archives, and also commented that he wasn't crazy about so
much of the API being in strings.
Based on this advice, I decided to revise my approach to this patchset, one
that is based around the stated desire to work with mbox formats. This
approach, in contrast to the mailstore approach that Michal Sojka proposed and
I revised, encodes all mail access information as URIs. These URIs are stored
in Xapian the way that relative paths are right now. Examples might be:
maildir:///home/ethan/Mail/folder/cur/filename:2,S
mbox:///home/ethan/Mail/folder/file.mbox#byte-offset+lenght
couchdb://ethan:password at localhost:8080/some-doc-id
Personally, this isn't my favorite approach, for the following reasons:
1. Notmuch, at some point in its history, chose to store file paths relative to
a "mail database", with the intent that if this mail database was moved,
filenames would not change and everything would Just Work (tm). The above
scheme completely reverses this design decision, and in general completely
breaks this relocatability. I don't see any easy way to handle this problem.
This isn't just a wishlist feature; at least two things in the test suite
(caching of corpus.mail, and the atomicity tests) rely on this behavior.
2. Mail access information, i.e. open connections, etc. can only be stored in
variables global to the mailstore code, and cannot be stored as private members
of a mailstore object. This is more an aesthetic concern than a functional one.
Anyhow, the following (enormous) patch series implement this design. I used
uriparser as an external library to parse URIs. The API for this library is a
little idiosyncratic. uriparser supports parsing Unicode URIs (strings of
wchar_t), but I just used ASCII filenames because I think that's what comes out
of Xapian.
Patch 11 is borrowed directly from the last patch series.
The last four or five patches add mbox support, including a few tests. That
part of the series is still very first-draft: I added a new config option to
specify URIs to scan, and ">From " lines still need to be unescaped. However,
we support scanning mbox files whether messages have content-length or not.
I will try to receive feedback on this series more gratefully than the last
one. :)
Thanks again for your time,
Ethan
