Hi Kris, welcome on board!

Quoting Krzysztof Ilowiecki (2011-12-18 18:59:28)
>I'm sysadmin/programmer and a physics student. I've been writing
>anything significant in Python for only a year now, but have
>previous experience with C. I prefer to contribute in Python, though.

If you're interested: Sebastian (spaetz) is looking for
a replacement to fork on the python bindings to libnotmuch.
A rewrite in cython would be great.

>.. however I have the
>impression that it may be trying to do too much for my needs, which may
>be peculiar. I have installed offlineimap+notmuch+alot on a slow laptop
>running Debian wheezy.
I guess most of us use offlineimap or getmail in combination
with notmuch. And Debian is also popular choice afaik,
so you're in good company :)

>How likely is it to mess things up in IMAP?
It being offlineimap? dependss on your config but I have no trouble
with it.

>I understand synchronisation across machines and with IMAP is something
>of an issue so far. How bad would it be to use git for that - and for
>'undo'? It would appear some people use git+maildir even instead of
>IMAP, but I guess the notmuch's database may be completely unsuitable...

Davd Bremner has been working on logging integration, which
is focused on enabling tag syncronization in future releases i believe.
Also check out nmbug, that uses git for notmuch bugtracking.

>Does alot have some sort of the design documentation,
There are fairly complete api docs available at alot.rtfd.org

>sketched vision it is heading towards?
world domination, obviously :)

>I think I should write down my ideas before I get
>too entangled in the implementation details, it would be good to
>know if something like this is already available.
check out the issue tracker on https://github.com/pazz/alot/issues ,
I'm using github to coordinate work on alot.

Have fun,
/p