Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] emacs: notmuch-hello status message refresh hook, etc

Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] emacs: notmuch-hello status message refresh hook, etc

Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2012 23:30:39 +0300

To: Michal Sojka, notmuch@notmuchmail.org

Cc:

From: Jani Nikula

On Tue, 04 Sep 2012, Michal Sojka <sojkam1@fel.cvut.cz> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 02 2012, Jani Nikula wrote:
>> Hi all, v2 of [1] addressing review comments: added NEWS, improved
>> documentation, made the query customizable.
>>
>> [1]
>>     id:"37899e28dbf67e4620a53279a869be3174c02d6f.1339775602.git.jani@nikula.org"
>
> Hello Jani,
>
> if I understand correctly, the goal of this patchset is to display the
> message with the difference in the number of messages before and after
> refresh of notmuch-hello.

Difference between two refreshes of notmuch-hello to be specific.

> I think the current implementation is unnecessarily complicated. It
> would be sufficient to implement this directly in `notmuch-hello'
> without any hook. If `notmuch-hello-refresh-status-query' is nil
> (default) no message would be shown. If it is configured to something
> else, the message would be shown provided that no-display is nil. This
> way you don't have to break existing user's hooks and achieve the same
> behavior, don't you?

I think it would be useful to pass no-display to hooks anyway,
regardless of the use here. I don't see that as a big reason to do this
one way or the other. Having this implemented directly in notmuch-hello
does not make this less complicated either. The only difference would be
having an if clause within notmuch-hello rather than an option in
notmuch-hello-refresh-hook.

This leaves us the matter of style. Tomi also expressed preference for
having this built-in to notmuch-hello rather than as a hook. I like
having it as a hook for a number of reasons:

* I think it provides a nice abstract interface without messing with the
  rest of notmuch-hello.

* I think toggling hooks on and off in the customization interface is
  nice (see e.g. notmuch-show-insert-text/plain-hook under
  notmuch-show). No need to add more and more customizations for things
  that can be options.

* If the user doesn't like the messages, it's easy to copy-paste the
  code to .emacs, modify, and add-hook.

* It serves as an example of what can be done in the notmuch-hello
  hooks.

If you and Tomi still insist on not having this as a hook, changing it
is not a big deal (faster than writing this email *sigh*). But even then
I'd propose merging patches 1-3 as those allow the user to write the
kind of hook he chooses.


BR,
Jani.

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