[sup-talk] [PATCH] Allow thread index view to sort oldest first

* [sup-talk] [PATCH] Allow thread index view to sort oldest first
@ 2009-09-25 21:08 Carl Worth
  2009-10-01 17:04 ` William Morgan
  2009-10-12 12:48 ` William Morgan
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 6+ messages in thread
From: Carl Worth @ 2009-09-25 21:08 UTC (permalink / raw)

Keith and I both want to read our email in chronological order,
(reading oldest messages first), so we believe it makes sense to
present the inbox mode in this order, (with the oldest messages at the
top).

This is distinct from the order for global searches where having the
newest messages first does seem obviously correct.

The below patches are a first cut at implementing this. They provide a
new configuration option, (:inbox_newest_first), which can be used to
control the default sorting for the inbox. Keith's original patch
doesn't change sup's behavior unless the user manually configures this
option to false. My second patch changes the default. Obviously, it
would be easy to accept Keith's version without changing the default
for sup.

One nice thing about the inmplentation is that any refined searches
inherit the mode of the parent search, which makes it easy to maintain
oldest-message-first for "reading" and newest-message-first for
"searching".

Also note that there's a new command 'o' to toggle the search order
for a current view. This is a feature that we talked about earlier as
a way to avoid the need for the distinction between the ',' and ']'
commands in thread-view-mode. If the user can control the sort of the
search view, then it would be more natural to have commands that
simply advance to the "next" message, (since the user can choose in
advance what "next" means).

A couple of caveats with respect to the patch as it exists so far:

1. When doing oldest-first searching, it wasn't obvious if it's even
   possible to query for only the N oldest messages (to lazily load
   new threads while navigating as sup currently does). So the patch
   currently loads all threads when in oldest-first mode.

   In my use so far this has worked well since I generally have a
   small number of messages in my inbox (and even fewer in my refined
   views of my inbox) and those are the only places where I use
   oldest-first sorting. For global searches, I do have an effectively
   infinite number of messages, but there I do use newest-first
   searching which still has the lazy loading.

2. Currently sup uses the date of the newest message in a thread as
   the key for sorting that message. This is correct for newest-first
   sorting. But when doing the new oldest-first sorting, the patch
   really should be augmented to instead use the date of the oldest
   message in a thread that matches the current search criteria.

   We haven't looked yet into how hard this would be to fix. (And we'd
   of course be glad for any help or pointers.)

-Carl

PS. We're still total ruby newbies, so please point out any silly
mistakes we're missing with respect to ruby idioms.
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