td serve has no way to run a TDQ query

[madic-creates]

Summary

td serve exposes no endpoint or parameter for running a TDQ query. Tested against v0.57.0.

I maintain td-gui, a local web UI that talks only to td serve. Its issue list can filter on status, type and priority and run a full-text search=, which is exactly what the API offers. It cannot express tdq queries like type = bug AND priority <= P1, even though td parses that happily on the command line, and even though td serve already evaluates TDQ server-side for a board's saved query.

What I would like

I have no preference:

• GET /v1/issues?q=<tdq>, or
• a dedicated GET /v1/query?q=<tdq>

Two additional properties that I think are important:

1. A malformed query should fail with an error message, with the parse error in the normal error envelope. td query already produces an excellent message (parse error at line 1, column 9: expected value (expected identifier, string, number, date, or special value, got EOF)); surfacing that over HTTP would let a GUI show td's own wording

2. The response should use the same issue JSON as /v1/issues, not the CLI's. If the endpoint reused td query -o json, clients would end up with two slightly different versions of the same object. One issue, td query -o json on the left and GET /v1/issues/{id} on the right:

      "labels": ["search", "tdq"],
   +  "available_transitions": ["start", "review", "block", "close"],
   +  "parent_id": null,
   -  "created_at": "2026-08-18T16:43:50.384145961+02:00",
   +  "created_at": "2026-08-18T16:43:50+02:00",
   -  "implementer_session": "",
   +  "implementer_session": null,

   Four differences:

   • Empty fields are left out instead of being sent as null. parent_id is present on issues that have a parent and missing on those that do not, so a client has to treat every field as optional
   • An empty session id is "" in one and null in the other. Same meaning, two values to check for
   • Timestamps differ in precision, so the same issue fetched from the two places does not compare equal. Anything that caches by value, or watches updated_at to decide whether a row changed, sees changes that did not happen
   • available_transitions is missing altogether, since it is computed rather than stored. A UI that renders exactly the transitions td reports would show an issue with no available actions at all

Workaround in the meantime

td-gui will shell out to td query <expr> -o ids -n 0 and join the returned ids against the issue list it already caches. It works, but it means the GUI spawns a process for something the server it is already talking to could answer, so I would rather delete it.