On Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:53:30 -0700, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote: > On Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:38:30 -0600, Mark Anderson <ma.skies at gmail.com> > wrote: > > I had briefly considered adding another output format "file", just to get a > > single file for each message in the db, but the file/files distinction > > feels a bit niggling. Perhaps it should be changed to "files" and > > "filelists" or something else more clear. > > Another option that would be general to several commands would be: > > notmuch search --output=files --exclude-duplicates > > Or alternately, --include-duplicates. That might be more useful for > "notmuch show" which is a case where users have previously asked for the > ability to ask for duplicate messages, (and where the duplicates are > squelched by default). > > Thoughts?
I personally prefer --output=files remain as it was, with one file per mail (even though I submitted the patch to change it). I suggest that we could add another format to supply all files (perhaps --output=allfiles, or --output=dupfiles). I don't like my original suggestion of "filelists" because it implies a list of lists to me. A list of lists would correlate better to the number of messages which match the search terms, but doesn't correlate well to xargs input. I understand that we could use --include-duplicates, but I don't think there are currently any output specifers that actually have a plurality for a single message. If we had something like --output=from, or some other message attribute, then I think we would achieve more useful orthogonality from adding an argument similar to --include-duplicates. As it stands, it looks better to me to have a different --output specifier to represent the uncommon case of multiple outputs per search match. -Mark