Re: proposal for more streamlined mail flow in notmuch

[Ben Gamari <bgamari@gmail.com>]

Excerpts from Jameson Rollins's message of Sat Jan 16 15:49:55 -0500 2010:
> To fascilitate this, two new functions should be implemented at the
> notmuch CLI level, so that things don't get fractured by different
> mail reader implementations:
> 
> notmuch purge
> 
>   delete all 'delete' tagged messages, and/or execute "delete hooks"
> 
> notmuch archive <search-terms>
> 
>   remove 'inbox' flags from messages and move messages an archive
>   maildir, and/or execute "archive hooks"
> 
I'm a little suspicious of this. Again, it seems like there is nothing
whatsoever preventing one from implementing this at a higher-level than
notmuch, which I believe should be little more than a thin-wrapper
around Xapian unless more functionality is absolutely necessary. I don't
understand why these sorts of proposals keep coming up when the above,
for example, could be easily implemented in a pair of ten line shell
scripts. Am I missing something?

In my opinion, the "fractured implementations" argument is mislead at
best. We currently have exactly two (in the case of vim, somewhat)
usable UIs.  It's not difficult to see to it that they obey similar
conventions. If another UI pops up that fails to obey your favorite
convention, feel free to patch it. IMHO, it is not the place of notmuch
to force semantics onto the user (in fact, it tries to avoid this
wherever possible).

- Ben