On Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:09:34 +0200, Ali Polatel <alip at exherbo.org> wrote: > Carl Worth yazm??: > > What do you think, Ali? Would an approach like that satisfy the things > > you had in mind for hooks? > > It might, here are some thoughts and questions to help you elaborate: > > - How will these scripts manipulate data? > e.g.: A "tagger" script may get the new mail from stdin and print out > the new tags which notmuch will read and apply to the message.
This can happen with current notmuch entirely with no real "hook" support. We've talked about switching from default tags of "inbox" and "unread" to simply having new mail tagged with a "new" tag. So a "tagger" script could operate simply by doing a "notmuch search" for messages with the "new" tag and could iterate over the filenames to process actual messages. (We don't have support now for emitting just filenames from a "notmuch search", but we have patches for that, and I'll be applying one soon.) So that's a taste for the "scriptability" I see in the current notmuch system that makes it really much more flexible than any "hooks" system. Additional flexibility comes from: * User can run a script like this at any point---not merely when messages are added. * User script isn't restricted to dealing only with "new" messages, but can act on any set of messages based on any search constraint, (or even all messages in the database). The results can then be applied by simply calling "notmuch tag" as needed. And if there are any performance problems there we can fix them, (such as, perhaps we'll end up wanting this script to be able to invoke a single process for all of its tagging rather than calling "notmuch tag" over and over). > A "search-filter" script may get search results from stdin and filter > them. Just my initial thoughts. And how would this search functionality and filtering be different than the search functionality provided by notmuch itself? I can think of at least a couple of ways it might be different: 1. It would be nice to be able to filter based on tags that are present in a thread, though perhaps not present in any message matching the original search. An obvious application of this is the "thread muting" feature, where once a message is tagged as "muted", no messages delivered to that thread in the future will appear in the inbox. This is a feature I'd like to put into the core of notmuch such that one passes a query to match messages and then also a second query to filter based on the collected tags in threads. Something like: notmuch search tag:inbox --filter="not tag:muted" 2. There are other details available at the thread level that are not available at the level at which message-based searching happens. A simple example of this would be the ability to search for threads with a single message, (perhaps checking to ensure that all requests had gotten at least one reply). But one can imagine more complex things as well, "Show me all threads where ImportantPerson sent a message and where I never replied in the thread." For this kind of thing, I think we simply want to build on the output of "notmuch search". The current output isn't very usable for this, but with things like the structured json output, etc. (which, again, I hope to be merging soon), it would be quite easy to write new tools that accept that output and provide additional searching and filtering, etc. And that tool could provide lua-based scripting or whatever else is desired. So my feeling is that if anything can live outside of notmuch, then it should, and should simply build on top of notmuch output. (And we should fix notmuch output to support that well.) And anything that must live within notmuch (or is best supported there), we should see if we can't just make that a core part of notmuch itself, (such as the --filter option I showed above). I'm *still* not wanting to squelch any experimentation with embedding scripting languages inside notmuch, or anything else. I'm just still not seeing anything that requires this. Look at the amount of emacs-lisp code we've written, for example, and the various things it does, (hiding away citations, etc.). That's all "scripting code", but that sits easily on top of the existing notmuch command-line tool. I think I'd prefer to keep that nice clean boundary until we find something that really requires changing that. But, show me something really cool that requires it, and you might convince me. :-) -Carl -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/attachments/20100115/aaacd133/attachment.pgp>