Re: RFC: marking spam via refs/notes/spam to hide it

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> Greetings:
> 
> I'm reluctant to delete spam because it rebases the repository -- for large
> ones this can cause excessive downloads to mirrors. A thought occurred to me
> -- would it make sense to just hide spam from the frontend? E.g.:
> 
> public-inbox-hide linux-kernel message@id
> 
> This would do the following:
> 
> - remove that message from search databases
> - attach a refs/notes/spam git-note to that commit
> - tell public-inbox-init/reindex to ignore this commit in the future

Aside from the git note, public-inbox-learn already does that:

   public-inbox-learn spam </path/to/message

   (scans everything in ~/.public-inbox/config since spam is
   frequently cross-posted)

I've been using it since the earliest days of the project and
frequently need it for the git@vger mirror.

It's also wired into -watch via watchspam (but the sa-learn step
to train spamassassin is broken atm).

> Seems like it would be easy to do and would give a way to remove spam
> without needing to edit git history.

It appends to git history, v2 changes the 'm' file to a 'd'
file with the corresponding blob; v1 removes the file from the
tree.  It doesn't add blobs to git history, but there'll be
new tree and commit objects.  There's no rebasing at all.

public-inbox-index has always handled unindexing it in mirrors,
too.