Re: [RFC PATCH] show: Add support for -format=raw -body=false

[David Bremner <david@tethera.net>]

David Edmondson <dme@dme.org> writes:

> On Monday, 2021-01-18 at 13:37:08 -04, David Bremner wrote:
>
>> David Edmondson <dme@dme.org> writes:
>>
>>> Similar to other formats, allow the body to be omitted when outputting
>>> raw messages.
>>>
>>> This can be used by UI code to get the full headers of a message
>>> without the need to consume the body, which may be large.
>>
>> I guess I'm a bit confused why this is for "raw" format, and not
>> "text". Are you proposing that we have two ad-hoc output formats for
>> consuming by scripts and other tools that don't want JSON or SEXP?
>
> "text" is a strange archaic output format, the rationale for which seems
> lost in time :-)

Yeah, at one time I wanted to get rid of it, but inter alia the vim
bindings use(d?) it.

> I wanted to get the Autocrypt or Face headers, so ended up using
> "--format=raw", but then end up with the entire message, which can be
> megabytes large. With the emacs UI, that means pulling all of that data
> into a buffer, just to ignore it.

Ok thanks for explaining the use case.


> Now, it would be nice to be able to say something like...
>
> notmuch show --format=sexp --body=false \
>   --headers=received-by,face,x-face \
>   id:foo
>
> ...to get some extra headers in the sexp output, but I didn't look at it
> yet.

There was a series at id:20191122230730.35712-2-johan.parin@gmail.com
that got stalled due to (I think) some issues with passing around
configuration information.
>
> The proposed change seems like a simple, obvious improvement that is
> entirely in-line with the existing interface and implementation. Is
> there any reason not to do it?

I'm just nervous about more legacy formats. I think we will get the
arbitrary headers thing working eventually, but I can see it might take
some time.