+++ /dev/null
-From: "Carl Worth" <cworth@cworth.org>
-To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
-Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:15:31 -0800
-Subject: [notmuch] Introducing myself
-In-Reply-To: <20091118002059.067214ed@hikari>
-References: <20091118002059.067214ed@hikari>
-Message-ID: <87aaykqe24.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org>
-
-On Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:20:59 +0100, Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez at igalia.com> wrote:
-> I have just heard about Not Much today in some random Linux-related news
-> site (LWN?), my name is Adrian Perez and I work as systems administrator
-
-Welcome to notmuch, Adrian! We're glad to have you here.
-
-> by default on most distribution. I got to have some mailboxes indexed and
-> basic searching working a couple of months ago. Lately I have been very
-> busy and had no time for coding, and them... boom! Not Much appears -- and
-> it is almost exactly what I was trying to do, but faster. I have been
-> playing a bit with Not Much today, and I think it has potential.
-
-It's funny, because I had the exact same experience with sup a couple of
-months ago. I had been frustrated for years with email programs, and had
-been thinking about how I'd like things to work n the back of my mind
-for a long time, (but never *quite* getting to the point where I would
-commit to writing an email system myself).
-
-And then... boom! I found sup and was instantly hooked. It had so much
-of what I had imagined, (and much of what I hadn't yet imagined) that I
-was quite delighted.
-
-It was really quite by accident that I ended up inventing a different
-system. I had started out just trying to speedup index creation for sup.
-If I hadn't run into the problem that it was very difficult[*] to create a
-sup-compatible index from C code, I might have stopped there.
-
-So I'd written a bunch of functional code, only to find myself stuck at
-the very last step, (hooking it up to the existing sup interface). Then
-Keith suggested emacs and it all seemed pretty easy since I'd already
-done all the Xapian work. So it's funny, I was only willing to commit to
-this project because I wasn't consciously aware I was working on it.
-Otherwise it would have seemed to overwhelming to start. :-)
-
-Anyway, that's a lot of off-topic rambling off of your introduction. But
-I'm glad that notmuch can now give that same "boom!" to others, and I'm
-glad you see potential in it.
-
-> Also, I would like to share one idea I had in mind, that you might find
-> interesting: One thing I have found very annoying is having to re-tag my
-> mail when the indexes get b0rked (it happened a couple of times to me while
-> using Sup), so I was planning to mails as read/unread and adding the tags
-> not just to the index, but to the mail text itself, e.g. by adding a
-> "X-Tags" header field or by reusing the "Keywords" one. This way, the index
-> could be totally recreated by re-reading the mail directories, and this
-> would also allow to a tools like OfflineIMAP [1] to get the mails into a
-> local maildir, tagging and indexing the mails with the e-mail reader and
-> then syncing back the messages with the "X-Tags" header to the IMAP server.
-> This would allow to use the mail reader from a different computer and still
-> have everything tagged finely.
-
-It is an interesting idea. But there's also something really comforting
-about the email indexed never modifying the mail files. If you're
-reading the notmuch commit logs closely you'll see that I'm not actually
-careful enough to be trusted with your mail (but I try). So I like that
-I don't even have to trust myself---the worst that happens is that I
-have to recreate my index.
-
-And as Keith mentioned, we've got the "notmuch dump; notmuch restore"
-idea working exactly as it did in sup. (Though I am thinking of also
-adding thread IDs to that now---more on that later.)
-
-The big annoyance I had with sup index creation, (I ended up having to
-do it more than once too), was that it takes *forever*. Right now,
-notmuch is a little bit faster, but not a lot faster. And I've got some
-ideas to fix that. It would be really nice if index creation were pain
-free. (And maybe it is for some user with small amounts of mail---oh, to
-have only 40000 messages to have to index!).
-
--Carl
-
-[*] The problem here is that sup puts serialized ruby data structures
-into the data field of its Xapian documents. So being compatible with
-sup means being able to recreate serialized data structures for a
-particular version of ruby.
-
projects / notmuch / blobdiff