Re: Mumi now uses raw emails and Mu

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Hey Jack,

>> If you’d like to take part in this effort to make Mumi more useful to
>> all of us, please reply to this message.
>
> I'd like to try to take part. I'm still very much a novice
> programmer/Guiler, so I might require a fair amount of hand-holding,
> but if others are working on it too, that should be fine.

Very nice!  I’m working on it too and Arun is the author of Guile Email,
which does all the heavy lifting of parsing emails, so we’re three
already :)

Forking Mu requires a rough understanding how it currently works.
Obviously, it must parse emails and extract certain headers.  We only
need it to extract a few more headers such as “X-Debbugs-Envelope-To”,
which contains the Debbugs bug number.  (I don’t know if that header is
set for *all* emails that end up in the bug tracker, but that’s
something we have to figure out.)

Mu is written in C and the header extraction probably happens in the C
code as well.

> With the currently deployed mumi, it looks like my mails in
> https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/36207 are still mangling the '’'
> after Ludo, but in a different way than before. Perhaps this will be a
> good place for me to start trying to debug and learning the mail
> processing code paths in mumi.

Yes, I noticed that too.  Previously that was because of how mumi
interpreted the response from the SOAP service.  We no longer use the
SOAP service and instead ask Debbugs for the raw emails, which are then
passed to Guile Email’s “parse-email”.  So the problem now is in fact in
Guile Email.

--
Ricardo