2. Allow an easy way to get tags from directory names (if the user has them)
-3. Allow an easy way to remove excess tags, (date-based search)
+3. Make emacs fast for big search results (see "lazy searching" below)
-4. Make emacs fast for big search results (see "lazy searching" below)
-
-5. Fix Xapian defect #250 so tagging is fast.
+4. Fix Xapian defect #250 so tagging is fast.
Emacs interface (notmuch.el)
----------------------------
lists such as announce lists if they are setup to deliver to their own
maildirs.)
+Allow configuration for filename patterns that should be ignored when
+indexing.
+
notmuch library
---------------
+Provide a sane syntax for date ranges. First, we don't want to require
+both endpoints to be specified. For example it would be nice to be
+able to say things like "since:2009-01-1" or "until:2009-01-1" and
+have the other enpoint be implicit. Second we'de like to support
+relative specifications of time such as "since:'2 months ago'". To do
+any of this we're probably going to need to break down an write our
+own parser for the query string rather than using Xapian's QueryParser
+class.
+
Add support for files that are moved or deleted (which obviously need
to be handled differently).
Investigate why the notmuch database is slightly larger than the sup
database for the same corpus of email.
+
+Xapian
+------
+Fix defect #250
+
+ replace_document should make minimal changes to database file
+ http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/250
+
+ It looks like it's going to be easy to fix. Here's the file to
+ change:
+
+ xapian-core/backends/flint/flint_database.cc
+
+ And look for:
+
+ // FIXME - in the case where there is overlap between the new
+ // termlist and the old termlist, it would be better to compare the
+ // two lists, and make the minimum set of modifications required.
+ // This would lead to smaller changesets for replication, and
+ // probably be faster overall
+
+ So I think this might be as easy as just walking over two
+ sorted lists looking for differences.
+
+ Note that this is in the currently default "flint" backend,
+ but the Xapian folks are probably more interested in fixing
+ the in-development "chert" backend. So the patch to get
+ upstreamed there will probably also fix:
+
+ xapian-core/backends/chert/chert_database.cc
+
+ (I'm hoping the fix will be the same---an identical comment
+ exists there.)
+
+ Also, if you want to experiment with the chert backend,
+ compile current Xapian source and run notmuch with
+ XAPIAN_PREFER_CHERT=1. I haven't tried that yet, but there are
+ claims that a chert database can be 40% smaller than an
+ equivalent flint database.
+
+Report this bug:
+
+ "tag:foo and tag:bar and -tag:deleted" goes insane
+
+ This seems to be triggered by a Boolean operator next to a
+ token starting with a non-word character---suddenly all the
+ Boolean operators get treated as literal tokens)