Re: proposal to remove contrib/notmuch-vim and contrib/notmuch-deliver

[Sebastian Schwarz <seschwar@gmail.com>]

Hello,

On 2013-04-09, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:
> David Belohrad <david@belohrad.ch> writes:
>
>> is actually someone using notmuch deliver?

I am using notmuch-deliver with maildrop.  This allows me to
filter and tag based on any header field of the message.

>> [...]
>
> notmuch-deliver is replaced by notmuch insert

Because of the way notmuch-insert(1) deals with failure it is
entirely useless to me.  From the manual page:

> This command returns exit status 0 if the message was
> successfully added to the mail directory, even if the message
> could not be indexed and added to the notmuch database.

This means that if the index is locked when a message is
delivered it will not be tagged appropriately.  The message will
still be written to disk.  However if you rely on the tags to
find the message it effectively gets lost.

notmuch-insert(1) should fail if it isn't able to successfully
perform all of the following three tasks:

- write the message to disk
- index the message
- tag the message

It should return with a non-0 exit status and let its caller --
the MDA or another notmuch client -- handle the failure, since
notmuch-insert(1) cannot make any guarantees by itself anyway.
This would usually make an MDA retry delivering the message at a
later time.

Regards,
Sebastian