[mu4e bug] Outdated mu4e-mark-at-point docstring

[Uthar]

Outdated mu4e-mark-at-point docstring

Hello!

I wanted to make trash marking act as a move to the trash folder, without setting the trashed flag.

This is a the scenario when the server handles auto-trashing, mentioned in the isync manual. It's also briefly mentioned in section 8.4 of the mu4e info manual.

The previous similar discussions are: #1018, #1136.

I implemented an advice function for this:

(defun mu4e-trash-by-moving-advice (args)
  "Makes `mu4e-mark-at-point' handle trash marks as moves to the trash folder."
  (cl-destructuring-bind (mark &optional target) args
    (if (eql mark 'trash)
      (list 'move (mu4e-get-trash-folder (mu4e-message-at-point)))
      args)))
  
(advice-add 'mu4e-mark-at-point :filter-args 'mu4e-trash-by-moving-advice)

It seems a better solution than modifying mu4e-marks (which was mentioned by previous posters: #1136), because it doesn't reference any internals or modify a defconst.

But I found the docstring of mu4e-mark-at-point confusing:

It says that for trash marks the target argument is non-nil. However, the current implementation ignores any provided target argument and uses a dynamically computed value via mu4e--mark-get-dyn-target. This, in turn, calls what seems to be an internal function under mu4e-marks -> 'trash -> :dyn-target. It then calls the user-provided mu4e-trash-folder function with the result of mu4e-message-at-point as argument. But if it did receive a meaningful target argument, I would have to consider handling it in the advice.

• Is that docstring outdated or am I misunderstanding the code?
• Is that advice reasonable from maintainer perspective, or is it likely to cause problems with future versions of mu4e?

How to Reproduce

It's only a documentation issue.

Environment

mu/mu4e 1.12.5

[djcb]

Wow, it's been years since I've seen that code... You are right, the comment was wrong, I've updated it now; thank you!