Austin Clements <amdra...@mit.edu> writes: > Quoth Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan on Aug 05 at 11:35 pm: >> Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan <r...@rkrishnan.org> writes: >> >> > Hi, >> > >> > Pardon me for using non-standard terms here because of lack of knowledge >> > of the language used in the email world. >> > >> > I have this thread in which some messages are tagged unread. When the >> > thread is opened, I see that those unread messages are not shown in full >> > in the threaded view. Instead they appear `folded' with only the summary >> > appearing in the thread, as if they are read. >> > >> > Here is a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Eh8SKe6.png >> > >> > I am attaching the messages in the thread shown in the screenshot as a >> > tar.bz2 file. >> >> I just forgot to mention that I see this only when I do a >> notmuch-search with `*' and not when I search with a tag. > > '*' turns out to be the key. When showing a thread, > notmuch-show-build-buffer constructs a new query from the thread ID > and the original search query of the form > > thread:X and (original query) > > If the original query is '*', this is > > thread:X and (*) > > But * isn't part of the Xapian query syntax. Notmuch specially > handles queries that exactly match "*" before passing the query to > Xapian. When * is embedded in a larger query, this special casing > doesn't apply. In fact, Xapian parses this query as > > (Tmail AND (and:(pos=1) FILTER GX)) > > The "and" in the query turned into a plain search term (the "AND" is a > proper boolean operator, but is unrelated to the provided query). > > This is a symptom of a general problem where we assume queries are > textually composable, when they are not. We have the same problem at > least in notmuch-search-filter and in notmuch tag query optimization. > In this particular case, the * causes Xapian's query grammar to fail > to parse the query, which Xapian handles by re-parsing the entire > query will all query features disabled (which includes disabling > support for boolean operators). Unfortunately, just handling * better > isn't really a solution because it's just one of many things that > violates query composability. > > Some solutions I can see are: > > 1) Switch to a composable query syntax (which would include *). This, > obviously, requires a custom query parser, but is the most > localized change I can think of and keeps queries as strings. > > 2) Never construct queries by pasting strings together. This would > require changes to both the libnotmuch and CLI interfaces and > queries could no longer be strings, but in the words of Alan > Perlis, the string is a stark data structure. (In the case of > show, I would actually love it if we could specify separate search > and match queries because that would eliminate --entire-thread as > well as the fallback in notmuch-show-build-buffer when search > returns nothing, but I digress.) > > 3) Keep queries as plain strings, but switch to some hybrid syntax > that lets us combine Xapian queries with composable operators > parsed by notmuch. When we need to combine queries, do it using > the composable operators. This actually may not be a bad way to > transition to a full custom query parser; I think it would be > relatively easy to take over parsing Xapian's boolean syntax, but > leave the "prob" parsing to Xapian. > > I lean towards 3 because it seems like the least disruptive and offers > a smooth transition to 1.
Update on this very old bug. As of notmuch 0.34 the notmuch CLI supports both 1 and 3 via --query=sexp, if compiled with the (currently optional) sfsexp library. My plan is that once sfsexp is sufficiently widely available (whatever that turns out to mean) to make it a mandatory dependency. At that point we can transition the emacs front end to using notmuch-sexp-queries(7) to compose queries. In principle we could start that work now by checking "notmuch config get built_with.sexp_queries". I'm not sure if it's worth the extra complexity, but it would make the transition smoother, and probably help test the s-expression query parser. d _______________________________________________ notmuch mailing list -- notmuch@notmuchmail.org To unsubscribe send an email to notmuch-le...@notmuchmail.org
