Re: How do I write labels back to the source Maildir?

[Josh Steadmon <steadmon@google.com>]

On 2024.01.25 00:26, Eric Wong wrote:
> Josh Steadmon <steadmon@google.com> wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> > 
> > This ended up being a longer email than I wanted, so to summarize, my
> > main question is: is it possible to have lei write labels created with
> > `lei-tag` back to the source Maildir which was indexed with `lei-index`?
> 
> TL;DR: not yet...
> 
> <snip all correct observations and usages>

Thanks for the explanation!

> > However, now I'm stuck trying to get that label metadata back into my
> > Maildir. I've tried both `lei refresh-mail-sync` and `lei export-kw`
> > with various combinations of options, but nothing is updating the
> > Maildir. I thought that at least one of these commands would update the
> > matching emails with an "X-Label: git-unit-tests" header, although now I
> > can't find any reference to X-Label in the lei docs, so I probably
> > confused myself somehow about that.
> 
> Correct.  I've been considering X-Label, but it also makes it
> more complicated to:
> 
> 1) to deduplicate messages when exposing lei/store blobs contents
>    (for lei import users) as a Maildir via FUSE3 (planned)
> 
> 2) to retrieve blobs for lei-index users; since blob contents end
>    up getting invalidated on the FS
> 
> Of course (as you know), blobs tend to stay forever in git
> (but hopefully deltafication can help reduce the space needed)
> 
> Good news is 2.0 (out soon, hopefully :x) no longer requires
> Linux::Inotify2 to get inotify support on most architectures,
> so inotify should work more easily out-of-the-box.

Understood. I'll keep an eye out for the release.

> Of course, X-Label is also non-standard and I haven't done much
> research into it...
> 
> * do other MUAs support it? (and differences from mutt)
> * does mutt support it for mbox, MH, IMAP, etc..?
> * character restrictions in supported MUAs? (vs. what chars Xapian allows)
> 
> Fwiw, I've never used X-Label despite using mutt for decades.

Yeah, mutt has a pattern modifier (~y) for X-Label. I am unsure about
other MUAs.

> There should also be a way to filter out X-Label (and any other
> arbitrary headers) when converting/exporting messages for
> public consumption.
> 
> > I *can* get lei-q to write these matching emails to a separate Maildir
> > using `lei q -o /tmp/git-unit-tests dfn:t/unit-tests ...`, but this
> > workflow is more annoying than I'd hoped for, as metadata is not
> > automatically synced between the various Maildirs, and it's a bit slower
> > in Mutt to switch Maildirs than to filter the currently open one.
> 
> Yeah, that's the current way.  The goal of the (future) FUSE3
> backend is avoiding duplication of blob contents onto disk and
> maybe easier synchronization of both kw and label metadata.
>
> Being able to auto-label (at least in Xapian) messages which
> enter a certain directory may also be a good idea.
> 
> > So to repeat my original question, is there any way to get lei to
> > somehow update the source Maildir to reflect the labels on these tagged
> > messages?
> 
> Again, not yet...
> 
> I've been distracted with the web UI for coderepo integration
> (to support lei-rediff in WWW) and also more distracted
> investigating ways to improve performance :x