Re: Create a group from a list of message-ids

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Frank Terbeck <ft@bewatermyfriend.org> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
> [...]
>> It also comes with its own tagging structure and all kinds of stuff I
>> don't use. The superfluity bugs me a little, but the searching is nice
>> enough that it doesn't matter. A nnir plugin for notmuch might actually
>> be nice.
>
> Actually, at least in the git version of gnus, ‘nnir’ seems to feature
> support for ‘notmuch’ (ie. there is a defcustom ‘nnir-notmuch-program’
> and a defun ‘nnir-run-notmuch’).
>
> Since ‘mu’ seems to work fairly similarly to notmuch, I would guess
> that, this part would serve as a source for ideas for ‘mu’-integration.
>
> Regards, Frank

Thanks to both of you for pointing that out! I had no idea that was
there, but would definitely prefer using a more gnus-y interface. I set
it up like so:

(setq nnir-method-default-engines  '((nnimap . notmuch) (nntp . gmane)))

And gave it a shot.

It didn't work for me for two reasons. I have several different imap
servers, all run through dovecot with a maildir structure. They're all
under ~/.mail, like ~/.mail/acc1 ~/mail/acc2 etc. That means
nnir-notmuch-remove-prefix has to be set to an appropriate value for
each server, which you can do with server parameters. But that means you
can only search one server at a time (which I guess you'd do by putting
a notmuch-group key into the query? I don't even know how to do that).
That isn't really what I want -- I'd like to search all my mail at once.
And even if I had to do it server by server, it seems like
`nnir-run-notmuch' should be able to figure out how to filter to that
server by itself...

The second problem was the maildir structure. I specify maildir through
the nnimap-shell-program parameter, which looks like:

/usr/lib/dovecot/imap -o mail_location=maildir:$HOME/.mail/acc1/:LAYOUT=fs

`nnir-compose-result' munges results differently depending on whether
they're maildir or not, but it only determines that by checking
(gnus-group-server server) for the nnmaildir string. I'd need to change
that, I guess by putting more thorough checking in `nnir-run-notmuch',
`nnir-run-namazu', and `nnir-run-swish++', which would then pass a flag
to `nnir-compose-results'.

Lastly, a notmuch result in my case looks like this:

/home/eric/.mail/pr/[Gmail]/Sent Mail/cur/1384510308.M437592P10993.pellet,S=3672,W=3728:2,S

Which would, if the above problems were fixed, turn into a result that looks like
["nnimap+PR:[Gmail].Sent Mail" "1384510308.M437592P10993.pellet"]. The problem
there is that the slash between [Gmail] and Sent Mail (which really is
a filesystem separator, because I've used LAYOUT=fs) gets turned into a
dot, when it's actually supposed to remain a slash. That's probably my
fault for using LAYOUT=fs, and it would be ugly to put a special-case
check for that in nnir.el

Ahem, so... Please consider that mostly notes to self. If you're not
using dovecot with a maildir layout, this probably won't be an issue.

I'd be happy to provide a patch for more thorough checking for maildir
structure, but I probably won't use this anyway, because I don't want to
be restricted to searching one server at a time.

All for now,
Eric