TODO: More notes on archive-thread and race conditions.

[notmuch] / TODO

diff --git a/TODO b/TODO
index 8f9a1a98c5ae13e925c30bcc90777d64525abec0..7ca07704b408472a79ce4b14255e893247190e25 100644 (file)
--- a/TODO
+++ b/TODO
@@ -1,12 +1,40 @@
+Write a "notmuch tag" command to add/remove tags from messages
+matching a search query.
+
 Write a "notmuch show" that displays a single thread.
 
 Fix to use the *last* Message-ID header if multiple such headers are
 encountered, (I noticed this is one thing that kept me from seeing the
 same message-ID values as sup).
 
-Fix "notmuch restore" to delete the old tags from a message/thread
-before adding new ones. This will require someway to temporarily
-'disconnect' a notmuch_message_t from the database, (that it, disable
-automatic sync for add_tag, etc.), and then reconnect it. That is, the
-removal and subsequent addition of tags to the message/thread needs to
-be transactional.
+Think about this race condition:
+
+       A client executes "notmuch search"
+       Then executes "notmuch show" on a thread
+       While user is reading, new mail is added to database for the thread
+       Client asks for the thread to be archived.
+
+   The bug here is that email that was never read will be
+   archived. That's bad. The fix for the above is for the client to
+   archive the individual messages already retrieved and shown, not
+   the thread. (And in fact, we don't even have functions for removing
+   tags on threads.)
+
+   But this one is harder to fix:
+
+       A client executes "notmuch search"
+       While user is reading, new mail is added to database for the thread
+       Client asks for a thread to be archived.
+
+   To support this operation, (archiving a thread without even seeing
+   the individual messages), we might need to provide a command to
+   archive a thread as a whole. The problem is actually easy to fix
+   for a persistent client. It can onto the originally retrieved
+   thread objects which can hold onto the originally retrieved
+   messages. So archiving those thread objects, (and not newly created
+   thread objects), will be safe.
+
+   It's harder to fix the non-persistent "notmuch" client. One
+   approach is to simply tell the user to not run "notmuch new"
+   between reading the results of "notmuch search" and executing
+   "notmuch archive-thread" (or whatever we name it).