how to work with entire threads

[Vladimir Marek <Vladimir.Marek@Oracle.COM>]

Hi,

I would like to create the following process:

 1) if I tag any message with the keyword 'kill', it means that I don't
   want to see any message from whole thread in my inbox

At the moment I do something like

THREADS=$(notmuch search --output=threads tag:kill)
[ -z "$THREADS" ] || notmuch tag -unread -- '(' $THREADS ')'

 2) if there is such a 'killed' thread and it won't receive message for
30 days, I want to remove the kill tag from the thread

That I achieved by something like

N=notmuch
KILL=$( $N search --output=threads tag:kill )                                                                                                                                                          
if [ -n "$KILL" ]; then
   # Then find threads which contain messages younger than 30 days
   KILL_RECENT=$( $N search --output=threads '(' $KILL ')' and date:30days.. )
   KILL_RECENT=${KILL_RECENT:-'*'}
   # Then find 'kill' threads not matching those recent
   KILL_COUNT=$( $N count --output=threads '(' $KILL ')' and not '(' $KILL_RECENT ')' )
   if [ $KILL_COUNT -gt 0 ]; then
      echo "Threads to remove 'kill': $KILL"
      $N tag -kill -- $( $N search --output=threads '(' $KILL ')' and not '(' $KILL_RECENT ')' )
   fi
fi



I was thinking if it could not be simplified. Without knowing anything about
notmuch or xapian internals, it seems that it would be handy to change the
search pattern to return threads. My two previous examples would then read like

1) notmuch tag -unread -- 'threads(tag:kill)'
and
2) notmuch tag -kill -- 'threads(tag:kill)' and not 'threads(date:30days..)'

Given that this would be possible in the first place, wouldn't it be a nice
addition to notmuch?

Thank you
-- 
	Vlad