Re: notmuch and public-inbox

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

Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 7:05 PM Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> wrote:
> >
> > Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > My workflow with notmuch is near to perfect, however, the only pain
> > > point I have is fetching all the mail of a particular mailing list.
> > >
> > > To do this efficiently public-inbox seems ideal, however, when
> > > searching information to link notmuch to public-inbox I don't find
> > > anything of value. In fact, I can't find an URL of a public-inbox
> > > repository of the notmuch mailing list.
> >
> > Kyle maintains an unofficial mirror at https://yhetil.org/notmuch
> 
> Nice. Who is Kyle?

A notmuch user and public-inbox user/contributor; beyond that I
don't know.

public-inbox is all designed so anybody can make mirrors of any
mail they have.  (as I've mirrored a bunch of lists myself
without ever asking permission)

> > There's no real relationship between them aside from they both
> > use Xapian (and I learned Xapian from reading the notmuch source).
> 
> I don't mean sharing the Xapian database (although that could be
> interesting for the future). I'm talking about as a client of
> public-inbox, not as a server.
> 
> I mean doing a git clone for a public-inbox repository and notmuch
> indexing that repository.

Ah, the git repository formats are documented at:

	https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox-v2-format.html
	https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox-v1-format.html

> > > Am I missing something or has nobody really worked on linking these two
> > > tools? Seems like an obvious area of opportunity.
> >
> > I think W. Trevor King (Cc-ed) also started looking something
> > many years ago, but I'm not sure if anything became of it.
> >
> > I never had the interest in using notmuch since Maildirs are a
> > non-starter with millions of messages with current FSes/OSes.
> > mairix + gzipped mboxes mostly works for me, (though mairix
> > indexing is silly expensive[1])
> 
> If notmuch was patched to support the public-inbox format--as an
> alternative to Maildir--then users of public-inbox could clone a
> repository, and use notmuch to index that.
> 
> I don't see how that could be difficult. But then again, I haven't
> looked at the Maildir code.

That would be cool; always room for more tools to interoperate
with each other.  (I'm quite busy with public-inbox and trying
to avoid AOT languages as much as possible).

Keep in mind some users are already happy with l2md and impibe
for writing Maildir, so there's already (space inefficient ways)
to make notmuch index data from public-inboxes:

* l2md - Maildir and procmail importer using C + libgit2
  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dborkman/l2md.git

* impibe - Perl script to import v1 or v2 to Maildir
  https://leahneukirchen.org/dotfiles/bin/impibe
  discussion: https://public-inbox.org/meta/87v9m0l8t1.fsf@vuxu.org/

(maybe more will appear at <https://public-inbox.org/clients.html>)