Re: [RFC] LKML Archive in Maildir Format

From: Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>
To: Bjorn Helgaas <bhelgaas@google.com>
Cc: Jasper Spaans <j@jasper.es>,
	kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	Eric Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>,
	Joey Pabalinas <joeypabalinas@gmail.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC] LKML Archive in Maildir Format
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2019 23:26:00 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190305232600.GA12110@dcvr> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAErSpo5a2oO=5byEuA5AouS=kBmj7ihw2EVYAvJcdti29Tf1HQ@mail.gmail.com>

Bjorn Helgaas <bhelgaas@google.com> wrote:
> OK, so I understand how to clone archives from lore.kernel.org and how
> to convert a git archive to a maildir (thanks, Konstantin!)
> 
> What I *don't* understand is how to effectively read this locally.
> Ideally I'd like to run mutt, possibly with notmuch for indexing.  But
> a maildir with 3M files seems impractical.  I did actually try it
> (without notmuch), but it takes mutt about 5 minutes to start up.  And
> the maildir is about 23G, compared with 7.5G for the git archive.

Right, relying on Maildir for long-term storage of giant archives
is not a usable solution with any general purpose FSes I know about.
git itself had the same problem with loose object scalability in
the old days and packs were invented as a result.

> Any pointers?  I guess there's no mutt backend that can read a
> public-inbox archive directly?

There's mutt patches to support reading over NNTP, so that
works:

	mutt -f news://$INBOX_HOST/$INBOX_NEWSGROUP

I don't think mutt handles mboxrd 100% correctly, but it's close
enough that you can can download the gzipped mboxrd of a search
query and open it via "mutt -f /path/to/downloaded/mbox.gz"

  curl -XPOST -OJ "$INBOX_URL/?q=$SEARCH_QUERY&x=m"

POST is required(*), and -OJ lets it use the
Content-Disposition: header for a meaningful server-generated
name, but you can also redirect the result to whatever you want.

For all messages since March 1, you could use:

	SEARCH_QUERY=d:20190301..

All the supported search queries are documented in
$INBOX_URL/_/text/help/ and the search prefixes (e.g. "d:",
"s:", "b:") are modeled after what's in mairix.  You'll need to
escape the queries for URIs (e.g. " " => "+", and so on).
Xapian requires date ranges to be denoted with ".." whereas
mairix uses "-" for ranges.

The main thing public-inbox search misses from mairix is support
for "-t" which grabs non-matching messages from the same thread.
I would like to support that someday, but don't have enough time
(or funding) to make it happen at the moment.

(*) to reliably avoid wasting resources from spiders/prefetchers

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