Re: search summary and exclusions

[Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com>]

Hi
On Tue, 29 May 2012, Peter Wang <novalazy@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 May 2012 10:03:35 -0700, Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net> wrote:
>> On Mon, May 28 2012, Peter Wang <novalazy@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Exclusions don't work the way I expected with the search command and
>> > --output=summary.  I would like messages with excluded tags to be
>> > treated as if they don't exist at all, but currently:
>> >
>> >   * excluded messages are counted towards the "total"
>> >   * excluded tags are included in the "tags" set
>> >
>> > Are these deliberate?  Especially the second point seems to conflict
>> > with search --output=tags, which doesn't show excluded tags.
>> 
>> Hi, Peter.  Can you explain more what you mean?  I'm not sure what your
>> two bullets have to do with --output=summary.  Messages are counted with
>> the count subcommand, and tags are shown with search --output=tags,
>> neither of which have anything to do with --output=summary, and both of
>> which accept the exclude flag:
>> 
>> notmuch count --exclude=true '*'
>> notmuch search --output=tags --exclude=true '*'
>> 
>> Maybe you can give a clearer explanation of what your issue is.
>> Examples help.
>
> Sure.  I keep draft messages in the mail store, and tag them with
> 'draft', and later 'deleted'.  I would like the exclusions to treat
> draft and deleted messages as if they didn't exist in the store.
>
> % ./notmuch search --format=json --exclude=true -- thread:0000000000009598 tag:unread
> [{"thread": "0000000000009598",
> "timestamp": 1338231998,
> "date_relative": "Today 05:06",
> "matched": 1,
> "total": 15,
> "authors": "Mark Walters| Peter Wang",
> "subject": "[PATCH v6 3/6] cli: make --entire-thread=false work for format=json.",
> "tags": ["deleted", "draft", "replied", "sent", "unread"]}]
>
> Here is a thread I participated in.  From this, my MUA displays "1/15",
> suggesting that there is 1 unread message out of a total of 15.  But
> upon opening the thread, there are only 11 messages visible: 4 were
> drafts (possibly deleted) which have been excluded.  To the user, it
> looks like some messages went missing.
>
> Therefore I would like search --output=summary --exclude=true
> to report the total number of non-excluded messages.  It doesn't need to
> be via the "total" field; a new field would be fine.

It is easy to add this to the JSON format but adding it to the text
format would probably break things, and I would prefer not to have the
formats diverge.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Would people happy with a change in the
text summary output?

Best wishes

Mark