Re: [PATCH] python: bind add_property/remove_property and related methods

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>]

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On Mon 2019-06-10 14:55:48 +0200, VA wrote:
> Le 09/06/2019 à 21:58, Daniel Kahn Gillmor a écrit :
>> We do expose this functionality in the library, so it's not the end of
>> the world to expose it in the python bindings, but i do worry a little
>> bit about encouraging people to fiddle with markers set by the indexer.
>
> Conflicts could be easily avoided by recommending a prefix like 
> "x-<project>-" to property names (see link below).

That makes sense -- we'd also want to encourage projects to note their
project name someplace central; having a namespace registry helps to
avoid collisions, and also helps to advertise the projects that derive
from notmuch :)

maybe update the wiki for that?

That said, if a given property is concretely useful, i don't want to
have it languish permanently in the x-<project>- namespace, or to force
users to adopt that particular MUA to use it -- i'd like to make it
available to all the notmuch-derived mail user agents.  Maybe that
happens only when the feature gets added to libnotmuch itself?  How do
we incentivize projects into getting that kind of widely-useful feature
into the libnotmuch mainstream instead of having it as a differentiating
factor for their specific MUA?

how should we think about managing these parts of the ecosystem?

> I'm writing a MUA, and am using properties to store an excerpt of each 
> message, so the MUA can show a preview of each message (like the Gmail 
> web app, or Apple mail client).

cool, this sounds super useful.  if you have a chance to write up how
you're generating/selecting this extract, i'd love to read more.

> Some pleople recently suggested sync info or other MUA metadata:
> https://notmuchmail.org/pipermail/notmuch/2019/027403.html

Thanks for the pointer, i'd missed that thread back in February.

I agree that there's sufficient interest to take this use case more
seriously.

> I took the documentation from notmuch.h but only edited to be consistent 
> with Python. Those warnings should also be added in notmuch.h, right?

Yeah, that's probably a good idea.  Is it asking too much to ask you to
update notmuch.h as well when you resubmit this series?

Thanks for helping make notmuch better!

       --dkg

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