Re: rfc for notmuch remote access script

[Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com>]

On Sun, 30 Oct 2016, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:
> Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org> writes:
>
>>
>> Personally, I prefer a simple script that assumes a certain type of ssh
>> client configuration. We can typically reference documentation written
>> by others how to do that, and just say "put that stuff under a Host
>> notmuch section in ~/.ssh/config".

Hi

The only possible downside I can see with this is if the address for the
notmuch-server varies. For example my router does NAT the address from
inside and outside my home network is different. I don't know if that is
a common setup, and quite plausibly I could configure things better. I
only mention it as it might be easier to change an environment variable,
than change the .ssh/config file.

Quite plausibly though the simpler common case outweighs that. If we did
want to support my use case above, maybe we could have an environment
variable to say which .ssh/config section to use, which most people
could completely ignore?

> OK, I misunderstood, and thought you wanted to edit the script after
> installation. Hence my question about installing into $HOME.
>
> I'm not using remote access, and I don't really have opinions about the
> best way to do it. I do have 2 concerns about the overall idea
>
> 1. I worry about the maintenance burden of extra code ./configure
> 2. I worry about promoting remote-notmuch for non-experts when the
>    situation with gpg seems quite broken, at least for people not
>    willing to store private key material on the server.

I wonder if we could do the following --

1) have 2 separate config targets for notmuch-cli and notmuch-emacs so
you can install one without the other.

2) Have things under contrib which config/make can install. Then this
script could go in contrib, which would be a clear signal that it is not
fully supported.

Moreover, point 2 would go very nicely with Jani's other patch
id:1477140605-3011-1-git-send-email-jani@nikula.org for notmuch prefixed
commands. It would mean we could have various notmuch extensions in
contrib and the user could install any they wanted.

Best wishes

Mark