problems with message/rfc822 parts

[Jameson Graef Rollins <jrollins@finestructure.net>]

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Hey, folks.  I've been noticing a couple of issues with message/rfc822
part handling in recent builds of notmuch/master.  They are rooted in
the new part handling rework that was done recently.  I just want to
mention them here, to make people aware of them, until we get a chance
to address them.

The first issue is that show --format=raw --part on a message/rfc822
part is throwing a gmime exception, even though notmuch is still
producing output and returning successfully.  I just sent a patch to the
list addressing the issues.  However, the test suite was apparently
unable to catch that something unexpected was being output to stderr, so
we still need to address that.

Another issue is that we're no longer outputting any of the headers of
message/rfc822 parts.  This shouldn't be too hard to hack back in, so
hopefully I can get to that this weekend.

There was also a problem with the emacs display of message/rfc822 parts,
and I just sent a patch to the list about that as well.

However, there is a larger issue related to the ones above which is that
message parts in general are not being handled consistently, including
the top level message.  amdragon and I were actually discussing this on
irc the other day.  A possible solution is to make a general
message-part-handling function, that handles output of headers and the
message body, and call that function both on the top level message and
on any message sub parts.  I think that would make things a lot cleaner,
and would make the output more consistent and intuitive.

A somewhat related issue is that the "raw" format for parts is not
really doing the expected thing in certain cases, particularly with
regards to message parts.  dkg and I sort of realized this when we were
reworking the part handling a couple weeks ago.  One expects, rightfully
so, that show --format=raw --part on a message part would output the
full, raw, well-formatted rfc822 message enclosed in that part.
Currently that is not the case, since, for instance, the headers are not
output and the part handling is recursing over all the message
sub-parts.

I don't know necessarily know the right solution for either of these
issues, although I have some ideas (assuming I don't run into gmime
limitations).  Feedback and suggestions would be wonderful.
Unfortunately I don't have time to work on any of these issues at the
moment (hopefully this weekend), but I just wanted to throw them out
there, in case anyone wants to tackle them before I get to them.

jamie.

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