Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes: > A few notes about the notmuch config as i'm wrapping my head back around > it: > > * at least for config data stored in the database, a configuration > entry with the value of the empty string is the same as an unset > configuration value. is that right? is that the semantics we want? > That's correct. These are the semantics we inherited from Xapian. At the time I implimented notmuch_database_config_*, that was the feedback I got, I guess on the grounds of simplicity. It could be changed; I guess not many people rely on the current semantics > > * we have no "unset" subsubcommand for "notmuch config", only "set" > and "query". should we have "unset" ? > Perhaps. Although there is an existing possibility to clear a value from the config by "notmuch set foo", which works for both values in the config file and values in the database. In a sense this is consistent with the proposed patch. Even if you care about the distinction between unset and empty string, the proposed patch is consistent with this behaviour; the ugly bit is the use of an empty string internally to signal unset. Probably this deserves some kind of comment in case we change the handling of empty strings. > To be clear, there are situations where it's reasonable to have a config > variable that you want to be the empty string, and you want that to be > distinct from "unset". Yes, I basically agree with that. FWIW, it doesn't really make sense to me to put any substantial effort into the database config functionality if the concensus is replace it with a flat file backend, as you and Carl have been discussing. That's probably a topic for another thread. _______________________________________________ notmuch mailing list notmuch@notmuchmail.org https://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch