Mark Walters <markwalters1009@gmail.com> writes:

> An alternative would be to ignore any .notmuch path with a xapian
> sub-directory. This would mean if a user indexed some subset of their
> mail before trying to index the whole thing they wouldn't accidentally
> index the old xapian database. 

If you wanted to be fairly careful, perhaps test for
exists(".notmuch/.xapian/flintlock" or ".notmuch/.xapian/iamchert"), or
some other very specific test.

> I think the above was suggested by rlb on irc but I don't think it got
> any reply. 

Not sure.  Though I'm wondering if I may have suggested we could add a
notmuch specific token file, i.e. .notmuch/this-really-is-a-notmuch-dir,
which lead to someone else suggesting we could just use .xapian.

Of course broadly speaking, ".xapian" might be a legitimate maildir too,
but ".notmuch/.xapian" seems fairly unlikely.

In any case, while I might prefer a very narrow test (as long as it
wasn't unduly expensive), all of the proposed solutions would have
handled my situation.

Thanks
-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
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