From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: myglc2 Subject: Re: Browsing Guix (or any) lists with Gmane Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2017 22:45:07 -0400 Message-ID: <86h8vh54r0.fsf@gmail.com> References: <87fub26clj.fsf@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:37087) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1dzDCt-0002cA-Fv for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 02 Oct 2017 22:45:16 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1dzDCq-0004AO-7x for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 02 Oct 2017 22:45:15 -0400 Received: from mail-qt0-x232.google.com ([2607:f8b0:400d:c0d::232]:46630) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS1.0:RSA_AES_128_CBC_SHA1:16) (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1dzDCq-00044f-36 for guix-devel@gnu.org; Mon, 02 Oct 2017 22:45:12 -0400 Received: by mail-qt0-x232.google.com with SMTP id 6so1522210qtw.3 for ; Mon, 02 Oct 2017 19:45:10 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <87fub26clj.fsf@gmail.com> (Maxim Cournoyer's message of "Sun, 01 Oct 2017 12:45:44 -0400") List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Guix-devel" To: Maxim Cournoyer Cc: guix-devel On 10/01/2017 at 12:45 Maxim Cournoyer writes: > Hello Guix! > > For Guix and Gnus (or to become) users out there, I thought I'd share > this brief post where I explained the process of setting up Gnus and Gmane. > > Here are some benefits: > 1. No need to locally store emails; just view them over NNTP. > 2. Easily subscribe to some lists in Gnus without having to go through > the mailman registration. > 3. Much nicer/convenient UI than the web archives pages; you can post > follow-ups directly. > 4. Rich collection of some 30000+ mailing list archives. > > The main drawback I've found so far is that server-side search facility > doesn't seem to be available yet in the new Gmane. Still, it's not too > long to load the full list of messages ever post to a list and use Emacs > or Gnus native features to search/sort. For several years I used and really liked gmane + gnus. I was shocked when gmane went offline at my vulnerability to something I had taken for granted. When gmane came back I found that the loss of search, which I relied on, was a killer. So I cooked up a workaround (see below). Gmane has been back, but, IMO, stagnant, for a year. I say stagnant because a year has gone by with no new news posts and the gmane search is still not working. NNTP without search is, IMO, TOTALLY lame. This makes me wonder about the depth of support at gmane and whether it makes sense to rely on it going forward. My workaround is to download the mail list archives to a local maildir cache indexed/searched by gnus/notmuch/nnir and read with gnus + nnmaildir. I use a makefile and mb2md running in the background to do downloads and trigger indexing. While not elegant, this bit of hackage frees me from depending on gmane or any other 3rd party and has turned out to be very reliable. There is really only one hitch - it suffers a hit each time you (re)open gnus. Apparently gnus has a scaling problem with large nnmaildir directories. E.g., my 1.9G cache takes ~45 sec to open on a 3.4 Ghz E3 w/2500 MB/sec Samsung 950PRO SSD. This is not really a problem in my situation because I run on the server and leave gnus open all the time. The 1.9 G includes all the guix lists, emacs-orgmode and geiser-users. But if I followed more or bigger lists expect the gnus (re)open might become prohibitive. I could avoid the gnus open hit by reading the cache with the notmuch gui or indexing/reading the maildir cache with mu/mu4e (which I do for my email accounts) since then I wouldn't be using gnus at all. I guess I continue to read these lists with gnus because I got into the habit :-) Of course the best thing would be for gmane to restore search and to be managed by an organization that has dept and staying power. If that happened I would gladly discard my workaround because gmane was truly a thing of beauty when search worked. [...]