[alot] Introducing myself, asking various questions

[alot] Introducing myself, asking various questions

[Krzysztof Ilowiecki]

Hello

summary: I'm new, would like to help, have lots of ideas, some time
and some python.

The list welcome message invites to introducing myself, so I shall
comply, even if this appears to be some configuration relic ;)
I'm using the [alot] tag as it looks to be what I'm most likely to
contribute to.

I'm sysadmin/programmer and a physics student. I've been writing
anything significant in Python for only a year now, but have
previous experience with C. I prefer to contribute in Python, though.
I've been a vim user for nearly eight years, though only recently did I
start using things like macros or global commands and writing functions.

My experience of email is that I hated it until I started using Gmail
in 2004. Since then I merely dislike it :) Or rather, I dislike the
MUAs.

notmuch has made a very good impression on me and I would like to
migrate to it away from gmail. I happen to have some time
available now.

I understand it is quite hard to provide an overview for newcomers of
the state of a rapidly developing project. Please correct me if the
following assertions are wrong:
 * emacs frontend is the most mature, enough for quite some people
  to use it as their primary MUA
 * alot is second, but is rather ambitious and very far from '1.0'
   * I could use it without a need to fall back to the emacs one
 * vim frontend is interesting, quite a bit less complete, and stalled
 * curses-notmuch is dead

I would like to try and help writing a python terminal vim-friendly
client. Alot seems like by far the bast candidate, however I have the
impression that it may be trying to do too much for my needs, which may
be peculiar. I have installed offlineimap+notmuch+alot on a slow laptop
running Debian wheezy. It is looking good with a testing account and I'm
considering connecting it to live accounts. How likely is it to mess
things up in IMAP?

I understand synchronisation across machines and with IMAP is something
of an issue so far. How bad would it be to use git for that - and for
'undo'? It would appear some people use git+maildir even instead of
IMAP, but I guess the notmuch's database may be completely unsuitable...

Does alot have some sort of the design documentation, sketched vision it
is heading towards? I think I should write down my ideas before I get
too entangled in the implementation details, it would be good to
know if something like this is already available.

Kris Iłowiecki

Re: [alot] Introducing myself, asking various questions

[Patrick Totzke]

Hi Kris, welcome on board!

Quoting Krzysztof Ilowiecki (2011-12-18 18:59:28)
>I'm sysadmin/programmer and a physics student. I've been writing
>anything significant in Python for only a year now, but have
>previous experience with C. I prefer to contribute in Python, though.

If you're interested: Sebastian (spaetz) is looking for
a replacement to fork on the python bindings to libnotmuch.
A rewrite in cython would be great.

>.. however I have the
>impression that it may be trying to do too much for my needs, which may
>be peculiar. I have installed offlineimap+notmuch+alot on a slow laptop
>running Debian wheezy.
I guess most of us use offlineimap or getmail in combination
with notmuch. And Debian is also popular choice afaik,
so you're in good company :)

>How likely is it to mess things up in IMAP?
It being offlineimap? dependss on your config but I have no trouble
with it.

>I understand synchronisation across machines and with IMAP is something
>of an issue so far. How bad would it be to use git for that - and for
>'undo'? It would appear some people use git+maildir even instead of
>IMAP, but I guess the notmuch's database may be completely unsuitable...

Davd Bremner has been working on logging integration, which
is focused on enabling tag syncronization in future releases i believe.
Also check out nmbug, that uses git for notmuch bugtracking.

>Does alot have some sort of the design documentation,
There are fairly complete api docs available at alot.rtfd.org

>sketched vision it is heading towards?
world domination, obviously :)

>I think I should write down my ideas before I get
>too entangled in the implementation details, it would be good to
>know if something like this is already available.
check out the issue tracker on https://github.com/pazz/alot/issues ,
I'm using github to coordinate work on alot.

Have fun,
/p

Re: [alot] Introducing myself, asking various questions

[Krzysztof Ilowiecki]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 20:32, Patrick Totzke
<patricktotzke@googlemail.com> wrote:
> If you're interested: Sebastian (spaetz) is looking for
> a replacement to fork on the python bindings to libnotmuch.
> A rewrite in cython would be great.

I'll have a look, but I've never tried cython and this sounds like
someone more experienced would be preferred.

> I guess most of us use offlineimap or getmail in combination
> with notmuch. And Debian is also popular choice afaik,
I was going to use getmail, but alot docs nudged me towards offlineimap
:)

>>How likely is it to mess things up in IMAP?
> It being offlineimap? dependss on your config but I have no trouble
> with it.

It being the whole stack, mainly alot - i.e. some bug that would mess up
the local copy which then would get synced up imap. I think I'm going to
try it with a live account anyway:)

>>I understand synchronisation across machines and with IMAP is something
>>of an issue so far. How bad would it be to use git for that - and for
>>'undo'? It would appear some people use git+maildir even instead of
>>IMAP, but I guess the notmuch's database may be completely unsuitable...
>
> Davd Bremner has been working on logging integration, which
> is focused on enabling tag syncronization in future releases i believe.

I am going to have a closer look at this. TBH it sounds a bit confusing
how logging is related to syncing, I guess it's more like a journal
rather than like /var/log

> Also check out nmbug, that uses git for notmuch bugtracking.

Does it mean it's possible to sync the database via git, which would in
principle enable putting everything in git? I guess it is much more
complex than it sounds, I will have a closer look.

>>Does alot have some sort of the design documentation,
> There are fairly complete api docs available at alot.rtfd.org

Thank you, these are very nice api docs indeed.
However, I meant something more like design goals, ui sketches, diagrams
with features not necessarily implemented yet. I guess this is mostly in
the developers' mind rather than on paper/bytes.

>>sketched vision it is heading towards?
> world domination, obviously :)

oh, now I see why the diagrams are confidential :)

>>I think I should write down my ideas before I get
>>too entangled in the implementation details, it would be good to
>>know if something like this is already available.
> check out the issue tracker on https://github.com/pazz/alot/issues ,
> I'm using github to coordinate work on alot.

Great, this looks like a very useful issue tracker.

Thanks alot for your reply!:)

K

Re: [alot] Introducing myself, asking various questions

[Felipe Contreras]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 9:32 PM, Patrick Totzke
<patricktotzke@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>.. however I have the
>>impression that it may be trying to do too much for my needs, which may
>>be peculiar. I have installed offlineimap+notmuch+alot on a slow laptop
>>running Debian wheezy.

> I guess most of us use offlineimap or getmail in combination
> with notmuch. And Debian is also popular choice afaik,
> so you're in good company :)

Personally I prefer mbsync (isync) because it's much more efficient,
and it's not written in python :)

-- 
Felipe Contreras

Re: [alot] Introducing myself, asking various questions

[Tom Prince]

On Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:59:28 +0100, Krzysztof Ilowiecki <k@ilowiecki.com> wrote:
> I understand synchronisation across machines and with IMAP is something
> of an issue so far. How bad would it be to use git for that - and for
> 'undo'? It would appear some people use git+maildir even instead of
> IMAP, but I guess the notmuch's database may be completely
> unsuitable...

I use git+maildir to sync my mails, and use notmuch dump+restore to sync
my tags. But currently, the tag syncing I do manually, mostly when I go
out-of-town with my laptop, since it still seems to expensive to do it
regularly (>1 day).

In particular, I don't sync the notmuch db itself, at all.

  Tom