Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> writes:


> At the very least, the error message could say "please run 'notmuch
> setup' from a shell".

This is implimented in git commit 1c2f2c960c (with the patch series in
this thread), and will be part of notmuch 0.18.  So far I only added the
assert to notmuch-hello (also known as M-x notmuch), but it would be
easy to add to other entry-points if people think it's a good idea.

>
> The current behavior (notmuch and notmuch-emacs 0.16-1 on debian) is to
> open a *notmuch-hello* buffer that says :
>
>   Welcome to notmuch. You have
>
> And in the minibuffer, a message says "notmuch exited with status 1"
>