On Sun, Nov 25 2012, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote: > Quoth Mark Walters on Nov 25 at 2:31 pm: >> >> Hi >> >> This series looks good to me (I have not reviewed the two bindings >> patches). Patch 2 looks like it makes things much easier to follow than >> the current code (if I understood the current pointer stuff it >> constructs the top-level list by doing pointer stuff to remove all >> messages which are replies from the complete message list). Indeed, the >> diff is more complicated than the new code! >> >> On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU> wrote: >> > This series adds a library API for iterating over all messages in a >> > thread in sorted order. This is easy for the library to provide and >> > difficult to obtain from the current API. Plus, if you don't count >> > the code added to the bindings, this series is actually a net >> > decrease of 4 lines of code because of simplifications it enables. >> > >> > Do we want the API to do more? Currently it's very minimal, but I can >> > imagine two ways it could be generalized. It could take an argument >> > to indicate which message list to return, which could be all messages, >> > matched messages, top-level messages, or maybe even unmatched messages >> > (possibly all in terms of message flags). It could also take an >> > argument indicating the desired sort order. Currently, the caller can >> > use existing message flag APIs to distinguish matched and unmatched >> > messages and there's a separate function for the top-level messages. >> > However, if the API could do all of these things, it would subsume >> > various other API functions, such as notmuch_thread_get_*_date. >> >> I don't know if this is the right API. For the matched message etc I >> think using the existing message flag APIs is simple enough. I am not >> sure about sort orders though: that looks like it would be much easier >> for the caller to have the correct sort by I am not sure what users >> would need it. > > For sort order, I would be inclined to simply construct the reverse > list the first time a caller asks for it. Theoretically the caller > could do this just as easily as the library, except that we don't > expose the list routines. > > If I do add sort order, I would also want to add some control over > which list is returned, since it would be asymmetric to be able to > request all messages in either order, but top-level messages only in > oldest-first. I think this would be pretty simple, and would give us > a reasonably general-purpose and extensible API. (It would also solve > the naming conundrum I mentioned below in my original email.) The code looks good to me. I'm interested to see the extensible interface for returning desired list in desired sort order :) Tomi > >> Best wishes >> >> Mark >> >> >> > >> > Also, is this the right name for the new API? In particular, if we do >> > later want to add a function that returns, say, the list of matched >> > messages, we'll have a convention collision with >> > notmuch_thread_get_matched_messages, which returns only a count.