mutt-kz responds poorly if the notmuch database is not writeable

[larsks]

I have at least three things accessing the notmuch database at various times:

• mutt-kz
• notmuch-deliver
• some python code using inotify to handle file renames

With only a modest amount of email I am already seeing frequent database contention problems as two programs attempt to write to the notmuch database at the same time. Mutt-kz responds poorly if the notmuch database is not writable when it attempts to make a modification. This can cause operations to fail and appears to trigger crashes on some occasions.

I'm not all that familiar with the notmuch API, but it doesn't appear to offer any sort of blocking mechanism to wait for the database to become available. This suggests that the appropriate behavior in the event of an error is to wait and retry as necessary until the operation succeeds (or until some set threshold).

[larsks]

It looks like amdragon has solved this problem in the notmuch library in the locking-v2 branch of http://awakening.csail.mit.edu/git/notmuch.git. He states via IRC that "I'm planning to restructure it before posting it to the mailing list, but I've been running it without problems for weeks now.". If this is going to be solved in the near future at the library level, this issue isn't important.