Provide an option to make thread summaries keep initial subject

Provide an option to make thread summaries keep initial subject

[Olivier Berger]

Hi.

Whenever a participant changes the subject in the middle of a thread,
the summary reported by notmuch search will change.

However, the result is that some mails tend to "disappear" from search
results, when (bad) participants reply instead of composing a new mail,
and change a subject (see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=688699 for more details
on that problem, and a discussion). Of course, they're still there, but
their subject being masked, one may then grep or C-s for a particular
subject and miss them.

I think it would be interesting to allow notmuch to potentially keep the
original subject and not the most recent one for the thread summaries.

What do you think ?

Best regards,
-- 
Olivier BERGER 
http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/ - OpenPGP-Id: 2048R/5819D7E8
Ingenieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut Mines-Telecom, Telecom SudParis, Evry (France)

Re: Provide an option to make thread summaries keep initial subject

[Austin Clements]

Quoth Olivier Berger on Sep 25 at  6:03 pm:
> Hi.
> 
> Whenever a participant changes the subject in the middle of a thread,
> the summary reported by notmuch search will change.
> 
> However, the result is that some mails tend to "disappear" from search
> results, when (bad) participants reply instead of composing a new mail,
> and change a subject (see
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=688699 for more details
> on that problem, and a discussion). Of course, they're still there, but
> their subject being masked, one may then grep or C-s for a particular
> subject and miss them.
> 
> I think it would be interesting to allow notmuch to potentially keep the
> original subject and not the most recent one for the thread summaries.
> 
> What do you think ?

I think this would be fantastic.  I've proposed unconditionally
showing the earliest subject before and it seems that people who
correspond mostly with those who have good threading etiquette would
prefer this change, but those who correspond with more people who use
'reply' like an address book prefer the current behavior.

Another option, which I'd like to experiment with but haven't found
the time, is to show *all* distinct subjects for matched messages in a
thread (modulo "Re:", etc) in the summary buffer, probably on multiple
lines.  Since most threads only have a single unique subject, they
would appear just as they do now, but it would be clear when someone
(or something, like git) changed the subject mid-thread.  This
approach would be far more robust while retaining good usability, but
it would require more code than just changing our subject-picking
heuristic.

Re: Provide an option to make thread summaries keep initial subject

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hi!

Regarding the following ideas -- from almost a decade ago ;-) -- is
anyone aware of any work in that area?

On 2012-09-25T15:31:37-0400, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> Quoth Olivier Berger on Sep 25 at  6:03 pm:
>> Whenever a participant changes the subject in the middle of a thread,
>> the summary reported by notmuch search will change.
>> 
>> However, the result is that some mails tend to "disappear" from search
>> results, when (bad) participants reply instead of composing a new mail,
>> and change a subject (see
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=688699 for more details
>> on that problem, and a discussion). Of course, they're still there, but
>> their subject being masked, one may then grep or C-s for a particular
>> subject and miss them.
>> 
>> I think it would be interesting to allow notmuch to potentially keep the
>> original subject and not the most recent one for the thread summaries.
>> 
>> What do you think ?
>
> I think this would be fantastic.  I've proposed unconditionally
> showing the earliest subject before and it seems that people who
> correspond mostly with those who have good threading etiquette would
> prefer this change, but those who correspond with more people who use
> 'reply' like an address book prefer the current behavior.

And then, especially, the following one would be very useful for me:

> Another option, which I'd like to experiment with but haven't found
> the time, is to show *all* distinct subjects for matched messages in a
> thread (modulo "Re:", etc) in the summary buffer, probably on multiple
> lines.  Since most threads only have a single unique subject, they
> would appear just as they do now, but it would be clear when someone
> (or something, like git) changed the subject mid-thread.  This
> approach would be far more robust while retaining good usability, but
> it would require more code than just changing our subject-picking
> heuristic.

I'm aware of notmuch Emacs UI 'notmuch-tree' and 'notmuch-unthreaded',
but these are not quite what is desired here: too verbose, compared to
the concise display variant of 'notmuch-search'.


Grüße
 Thomas\r

Re: Provide an option to make thread summaries keep initial subject

[David Bremner]

Thomas Schwinge <thomas@schwinge.name> writes:

> Hi!
>
> Regarding the following ideas -- from almost a decade ago ;-) -- is
> anyone aware of any work in that area?

[snip]

> Austin wrote:
>> I think this would be fantastic.  I've proposed unconditionally
>> showing the earliest subject before and it seems that people who
>> correspond mostly with those who have good threading etiquette would
>> prefer this change, but those who correspond with more people who use
>> 'reply' like an address book prefer the current behavior.

So just to be clear, when viewing threads with sort-order=oldest-first,
the initial subject is in fact show. So if I understand the request
correctly, the request is to decouple which subject is shown from the
sort-order?

> And then, especially, the following one would be very useful for me:
>
>> Another option, which I'd like to experiment with but haven't found
>> the time, is to show *all* distinct subjects for matched messages in a
>> thread (modulo "Re:", etc) in the summary buffer, probably on multiple
>> lines.  Since most threads only have a single unique subject, they
>> would appear just as they do now, but it would be clear when someone
>> (or something, like git) changed the subject mid-thread.  This
>> approach would be far more robust while retaining good usability, but
>> it would require more code than just changing our subject-picking
>> heuristic.
>
> I'm aware of notmuch Emacs UI 'notmuch-tree' and 'notmuch-unthreaded',
> but these are not quite what is desired here: too verbose, compared to
> the concise display variant of 'notmuch-search'.

I don't think anyone picked up on this.  It would probably require
augmenting the json / sexpr to list all the subjects. I guess the
existing machinery to collect authors (lib/thread.cc) could be copied /
generalized to collect subjects. There is also some question of what
constitutes a change in subject, but there are already some (probably
inadequate) heuristics in the library for that. Another issue is how to
return the subjects from the library. Currently the authors are returned
as a comma separated list, but I doubt that's what you want for
subjects. C being C, we'd probably have to settle for some char ** null
terminated array of pointers.