On Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:28:40 -0500, Austin Clements <amdragon at MIT.EDU> wrote: > Quoth Pieter Praet on Jan 12 at 6:07 pm: > > On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:40:21 -0500, Austin Clements <amdragon at MIT.EDU> > > wrote: > > > Quoth Jameson Graef Rollins on Nov 20 at 12:10 pm: > > > > The open question seems to be how we handle the content encoding > > > > parameters. My argument is that those should either be used by notmuch > > > > to properly encode the content for the consumer. If that's not > > > > possible, then just those parameters needed by the consumer to decode > > > > the content should be output. > > > > > > If notmuch is going to include part content in the JSON output (which > > > perhaps it shouldn't, as per recent IRC discussions), then it must > > > handle content encodings because JSON must be Unicode and therefore > > > the content strings in the JSON must be Unicode. > > > > Having missed the IRC discussions: what is the rationale for not > > including (specific types of?) part content in the JSON output ? > > Eg. how about inline attached text/x-patch ? > > Technically the IRC discussion was about not including *any* part > content in the JSON output, and always using show --format=raw or > similar to retrieve desired parts. Currently, notmuch includes part > content in the JSON only for text/*, *except* when it's text/html. I > assume non-text parts are omitted because binary data is hard to > represent in JSON and text/html is omitted because some people don't > need it. However, this leads to some peculiar asymmetry in the Emacs > code where sometimes it pulls part content out of the JSON and > sometimes it retrieves it using show --format=raw. This in turn leads > to asymmetry in content encoding handling, since notmuch handles > content encoding for parts included in the JSON (and there's no good > way around that since JSON is Unicode), but not for parts retrieved as > raw. > > The idea discussed on IRC was to remove all part content from the JSON > output and to always use show to retrieve it, possibly beefing up > show's support for content decoding (and possibly introducing a way to > retrieve multiple raw parts at once to avoid re-parsing). This would > get the JSON format out of the business of guessing what consumers > need, simplify the Emacs code, and normalize content encoding > handling.
Full ACK. One concern though (IIUC): Due to the prevalence of retarded MUA's, not outputting 'text/plain' and/or 'text/html' parts is unfortunately all too often equivalent to not outputting anything at all, so wouldn't we, in essence, be reducing `show --format=json' to an ever-so-slightly augmented `search --format=json' ? Peace -- Pieter
