public-inbox, nmbug or Debbugs and notmuch sync?

public-inbox, nmbug or Debbugs and notmuch sync?

[zimoun]

Hi,

I used Emacs and Notmuch to deal with many public lists.  Thanks!  It
helps a lot.

These days, I am switching from the “subscription“ way to a “fetch” way
via public-inbox thanks to Kyle’s instance <https://yhetil.org> – I
mainly follow Guix.

Currently, I synchronize my various Notmuch database using ’muchsync’
[1] which works well enough for my needs.  Although I am not completely
satisfied.

Well, I have read this thread, starting at [2]:

        WIP: promote nmbug to user sync tool
        id:20220423133848.3852688-1-david@tethera.net

somehow promoting the subcommand “notmuch git”.


All in all, my questions are:

 1. Is it possible to index the Git repo as public-inbox?  From this
 thread id:608c9185115fd_251d208e0@natae.notmuch [3], I guess no, right?

 Is it planned?  Or any interest?


 2. Notmuch is strongly linked to the Maildir format as storage but Git
 seems an efficient way to exchange and sync across several machines; for
 instance using the tool grokmirror [4].  Does it make sense to have
 another backend for Notmuch than Maildir?


 3. Debian or GNU use instances of Debbugs.  Tools as ’mailscripts’ [5]
 using ’bts’ CLI [6] are great.  Personally, I prefer the Emacs packages
 ’piem’ [7] and ’debbugs’ [8].  Well, the point is to be able to inject
 the bug report to my local inboxes – for reading offline or for
 tagging.  How could I bridge the Debbugs meta info with a local ’nmbug’?


Thanks in advance for any pointers or comments. :-)


1: <https://www.muchsync.org/>
2: <https://yhetil.org/notmuch/20220423133848.3852688-1-david@tethera.net>
3: <https://yhetil.org/notmuch/608c9185115fd_251d208e0@natae.notmuch/#r>
4: <https://github.com/mricon/grokmirror>
5: <https://git.spwhitton.name/mailscripts/>
6: <https://salsa.debian.org/debian/devscripts/-/blob/master/scripts/bts.pl>
7: <https://git.kyleam.com/piem/about/>
8: <https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/debbugs.html>



Cheers,
simon\r

Re: public-inbox, nmbug or Debbugs and notmuch sync?

[David Bremner]

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

>
> Currently, I synchronize my various Notmuch database using ’muchsync’
> [1] which works well enough for my needs.  Although I am not completely
> satisfied.
>
> Well, I have read this thread, starting at [2]:
>
>         WIP: promote nmbug to user sync tool
>         id:20220423133848.3852688-1-david@tethera.net
>
> somehow promoting the subcommand “notmuch git”.
>
>
> All in all, my questions are:
>
>  1. Is it possible to index the Git repo as public-inbox?  From this
>  thread id:608c9185115fd_251d208e0@natae.notmuch [3], I guess no, right?
>
>  Is it planned?  Or any interest?

If I understand your question correctly, the answer is no, and at least
I have no plans for something like that. An nmbug / notmuch-git repo
only contains metadata, not the actual messages. 

>  2. Notmuch is strongly linked to the Maildir format as storage but Git
>  seems an efficient way to exchange and sync across several machines; for
>  instance using the tool grokmirror [4].  Does it make sense to have
>  another backend for Notmuch than Maildir?

I don't know grokmirror, it looks like a layer on top of git. You
can commit maildir to git if you like, notmuch doesn't really care.
As far as having a backend that is not just mail files on disk, that
seems unlikely, but I guess you never know.

>  3. Debian or GNU use instances of Debbugs.  Tools as ’mailscripts’ [5]
>  using ’bts’ CLI [6] are great.  Personally, I prefer the Emacs packages
>  ’piem’ [7] and ’debbugs’ [8].  Well, the point is to be able to inject
>  the bug report to my local inboxes – for reading offline or for
>  tagging.  How could I bridge the Debbugs meta info with a local ’nmbug’?

You can use notmuch-slurp-debbug (from mailscripts) to get the mail
messages. I haven't thought about synchronizing metadata with
debbugs. In principle I guess it should be possible.

d\r

Re: public-inbox, nmbug or Debbugs and notmuch sync?

[zimoun]

Hi David,

Thanks for the answer.

On Mon, 09 May 2022 at 12:15, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:
> zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

>>  2. Notmuch is strongly linked to the Maildir format as storage but Git
>>  seems an efficient way to exchange and sync across several machines; for
>>  instance using the tool grokmirror [4].  Does it make sense to have
>>  another backend for Notmuch than Maildir?
>
> I don't know grokmirror, it looks like a layer on top of git. You
> can commit maildir to git if you like, notmuch doesn't really care.
> As far as having a backend that is not just mail files on disk, that
> seems unlikely, but I guess you never know.

For instance, I have never been fully satisfied by a tool synchronizing
several large Maildir across machines.  Or a tool for mirroring a public
mailing list.  Unsatisfied because such tool are inefficient or long to
configure; except muchsync which is strongly focused on notmuch.

A tool as public-inbox makes that easy by relying on Git.  Maybe I
misunderstand but from my understanding public-inbox does not track the
files under Maildir as a whole using Git but store [1] the messages in the
Git history, one message per commit.  Somehow, only the last message is
plainly visible and all the others are “hidden” under .git/ as various
Git objects.

Note that in addition, public-inbox can be configured using Xapian.
Well, I am not interested by this part since Notmuch perfectly fits my
needs.

I like an unified interface – I am really happy with Emacs – and the
Emacs fronted for Notmuch.

Somehow, on one hand, I find really handy public-inbox (and other tools
as lei or b4) to follow various public mailing lists.  On the other
hand, I still have (private) email inboxes and I find really handy
Notmuch.  Even, I find really handy Emacs+Notmuch to read and filter all
the messages.

Therefore, I have to convert from public-inbox to maildir and then index
for reading or searching with Emacs+Notmuch.  Otherwise, I would have to
do the opposite and convert my maildirs sync with IMAP to public-inbox
format.

Somehow, I would like to have a bridge: keep Emacs+Notmuch but index
emails with another format (backend) than maildir as
public-inbox-v2-format.  It would avoid data duplication and/or
conversion.

1: <https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox-v2-format.html>


>>  3. Debian or GNU use instances of Debbugs.  Tools as ’mailscripts’ [5]
>>  using ’bts’ CLI [6] are great.  Personally, I prefer the Emacs packages
>>  ’piem’ [7] and ’debbugs’ [8].  Well, the point is to be able to inject
>>  the bug report to my local inboxes – for reading offline or for
>>  tagging.  How could I bridge the Debbugs meta info with a local ’nmbug’?
>
> You can use notmuch-slurp-debbug (from mailscripts) to get the mail
> messages. I haven't thought about synchronizing metadata with
> debbugs. In principle I guess it should be possible.

About notmuch-slurp-debbug, thanks.  I have tried it, but it uses the
Perl script ’bts’ and it is not packaged for Guix… Aside it would
require some tweaks, if I have checked correctly.

From my point of view, Debbugs is old and many things as interaction is
a poor experience.  The Guix community has a layer named Mumi [2] on the
top of the GNU instance of Debbugs.  You can find an instance here [3].
Well, another story. ;-)

Somehow, if ’nmbug’ would be able to extract the meta info from Debbugs,
roughly speaking a map between Message-ID and status, and this map would
be stored as Notmuch tags.  Then, using “notmuch git” would allow an
easy way for synchronizing my local copy of the bugs mailing lists with
the current state of Debbugs.  Bah, I do not know. ;-)


2: <https://git.elephly.net/?p=software/mumi.git;a=summary>
3: <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/>


Thanks again for the answer.

Cheers,
simon\r

Re: public-inbox, nmbug or Debbugs and notmuch sync?

[David Bremner]

zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> writes:

>
> Somehow, I would like to have a bridge: keep Emacs+Notmuch but index
> emails with another format (backend) than maildir as
> public-inbox-v2-format.  It would avoid data duplication and/or
> conversion.
>
> 1: <https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox-v2-format.html>
>

I talked to the public-inbox author at some point about using notmuch,
but perl bindings were a hard requirement for that. I don't know of and
other interest in perl bindings, and especially no volunteers to
maintain them, so that idea kind of stalled.

>
>>>  3. Debian or GNU use instances of Debbugs.  Tools as ’mailscripts’ [5]
>>>  using ’bts’ CLI [6] are great.  Personally, I prefer the Emacs packages
>>>  ’piem’ [7] and ’debbugs’ [8].  Well, the point is to be able to inject
>>>  the bug report to my local inboxes – for reading offline or for
>>>  tagging.  How could I bridge the Debbugs meta info with a local ’nmbug’?
>>
>> You can use notmuch-slurp-debbug (from mailscripts) to get the mail
>> messages. I haven't thought about synchronizing metadata with
>> debbugs. In principle I guess it should be possible.

> Somehow, if ’nmbug’ would be able to extract the meta info from Debbugs,
> roughly speaking a map between Message-ID and status, and this map would
> be stored as Notmuch tags.  Then, using “notmuch git” would allow an
> easy way for synchronizing my local copy of the bugs mailing lists with
> the current state of Debbugs.  Bah, I do not know. ;-)

At the moment I am focussed on getting notmuch-git to perform a simpler
task well enough to ship as part of notmuch.\r

Re: public-inbox, nmbug or Debbugs and notmuch sync?

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Mon, 09 May 2022 at 16:07, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> wrote:

> I talked to the public-inbox author at some point about using notmuch,
> but perl bindings were a hard requirement for that. I don't know of and
> other interest in perl bindings, and especially no volunteers to
> maintain them, so that idea kind of stalled.

Thanks.  Ah if it is Perl then it is out of my scope. :-)

I was thinking about the implementation of the format
public-inbox-v2-format defined by [1] as part of the Notmuch API.  And
not use the Perl bindings to access to format; well that’s say how I
feel about Perl. ;-)


1: <https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox-v2-format.html>


> At the moment I am focussed on getting notmuch-git to perform a simpler
> task well enough to ship as part of notmuch.

Thanks.  I hope that notmuch-git will simplify the 3-way synchronization
across several machines.


Cheers,
simon\r