Ok I now have a patch set which might be complete enough to be worth
reviewing. It is essentially complete and appears to work.
Things that still need doing:
updating the test suite. The series changes notmuch-show to
output the exclude flag so several tests need updating. Of
course, the new functionality needs some tests too.
emacs/notmuch.el I think it would be nice to hide (make
invisible) threads with no matching non-excluded messages (with a
toggle for visibility) but that is definitely beyond my elisp
skills.
The first patch of the series is not really part of the series: it adds
a --do-not-exclude option to tell the command not to exclude. I think
this is useful anyway, but it also simplifies behaviour decisions with
the excludes. For example notmuch count will only count matching
non-excluded messages but notmuch count --do-not-exclude will count
all matching messages excluded or not.
One outstanding issue is that raised in
id:"20120124025331.GZ16740@mit.edu". I will need to think about
that.
Best wishes
Mark