Re: Updating mumi on berlin

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Arun,

On Wed, 27 Apr 2022 at 16:44, Arun Isaac <arunisaac@systemreboot.net> wrote:

> Yes, with the update, Mumi will have a GraphQL API. GraphQL APIs are
> more flexible than traditional REST APIs. See https://graphql.org/ for
> more.

Is the update of Mumi done?


Well, this GraphQL API could ease the current workflow, IMHO.

Today, one has to subscribe and it is not easy to locally read the
archives or follow what is going in.  The Emacs front-end to Debbugs
helps but Emacs is not always popular.

Instead of subscription, public-inbox provides the archives as a Git
repo.  Therefore, being up to date just becomes “guix pull” and the Git
repo can be transformed to Maildir using e.g.,

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
    $git rev-list <range> | while read sha; do
	$git show $sha:m > <maildir>/new/$sha
    done
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

(modulo some errors for deleted messaged, another story).


The main issue is to synchronize the status of the Debbugs database;
from the messages, we cannot deduce the status, etc.

This GraphQL API would help to bridge the gap… at least my gap. ;-)


> At some point, I plan to add support for identifying a message just by
> its Message-ID. IIRC, zimoun requested this feature once. With this, I
> hope to write a simple 'mumi send-email' program or similar, that will
> let us send a patchset to mumi all in one go without inadvertently
> opening multiple issues.

Really cool!

Debian has this CLI tool [1], allowing to request against Debbugs.  It
could be nice to have a similar tool based on the top of Mumi.

And for instance, using this ’bts’ Debian script, it is “easy“ to have
other scripts for importing [2] bugs to any mail reader using Maildir.
Given a bug number, it allows to download all the thread of that bug.

We could package these Debian scripts and tweak them to work with the
Guix instance… Or maybe we could have some Scheme scripts. ;-)


About Message-ID and Mumi, yeah… for example, it is just an instant
using notmuch for finding the patch where you tweak Xapian and ‘guix
search’.  But to publicly refer to it, I have to open my browser scroll
and scroll again, and found it; the 14th message in the thread.  Well,
since I can easily stash the Message-ID from notmuch and I can easily
build an URL with it, then I think that:

   https://issues.guix.gnu.org/20200227204150.30985-1-arunisaac@systemreboot.net

redirecting to,

   https://issues.guix.gnu.org/39258#14

would simplify my workflow. :-)  It appears to me weird that all is
built around email but core components as Message-Id is barely used.


1: <https://salsa.debian.org/debian/devscripts/-/blob/master/scripts/bts.pl>
2: <https://git.spwhitton.name/mailscripts/tree/maildir-import-patch.1.pod>


Cheers,
simon