Mail archives in Git using ssoma (Docker image)

[Eric Wong]

"W. Trevor King" <wking at tremily.us> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 12:08:52PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:
> > "W. Trevor King" <wking at tremily.us> wrote:
> > > This is the ssoma archive (with the data in it).  I just set up a
> > > basic HTTP archive (following [1]) based on a Docker image [2] (Gentoo
> > > doesn't package all the Perl dependencies public-inbox needs).
> > 
> > Ugh, that sucks (sorry, not a fan of Docker).
> > 
> > What's missing from Gentoo?
> 
> Gentoo doesn't package (or I couldn't find the package for)
> Encode::MIME::Header or Mail::Thread.  I tried installing things from
> CPAN, but ran into a compile-time error from the ‘cpan’ invocationand
> gave up ;).  I can try and reproduce the error if you're curious, but
> I don't have it handy at the moment.

Encode::MIME::Header is distributed with perl itself on Debian and also
the stock upstream install.  Not sure if there's an option you missed or
disabled.

Which perl version do you use?

perl on 5.14 Debian wheezy even seems to have it.  I actually
still want everything to work on 5.8, since that seems to be
the de-facto baseline in the wild.


Mail::Thread is one .pm, and I'll probably replace it with
something (same algorithm) which can use half the memory by
avoiding wrapper object abstractions (it's probably the biggest
memory hog at the moment).

lib/PublicInbox/Thread.pm already has 3 monkey patches to workaround
upstream bugs in Mail::Thread.  It's dead upstream, and not available on
FreeBSD, either.

> > >   $ git config -f srv/notmuch.git/config publicinbox.http http://tremily.us
> > >   $ git config -f srv/notmuch.git/config publicinbox.email notmuch at notmuchmail.org
> > 
> > That should probably be:
> > 
> > 	; based on your [3]
> > 	git config -f srv/notmuch.git/config \
> > 		publicinbox.notmuch.url http://tremily.us/notmuch
> > 
> > 	git config -f srv/notmuch.git/config \
> > 		publicinbox.notmuch.address notmuch at notmuchmail.org
> > 
> > 	; this is crucial for all the public-inbox-* tools
> > 	git config -f srv/notmuch.git/config \
> > 		publicinbox.notmuch.mainrepo /path/to/notmuch.git
> 
> I was using these in the Dockerfile's CMD:
> 
>   (cd /srv;
>    for NAME in *;
>    do
>      CONF="/srv/${NAME}/config";
>      public-inbox-init "${NAME}" "/srv/${NAME}" $(git config -f "${CONF}" publicinbox.http) $(git config -f "${CONF}" publicinbox.email);
>    done) && …
> 
> Are you saying that I can skip the ~/.public-inbox/config entries
> setup by public-inbox-init if I set publicinbox.{name}.* in the ssoma
> repository's config?  That would be nice.

Erm, sorry, no, I mean ~/.public-inbox/config as the "git config -f"
arg in the above commands.  Your original config was
meaningless in the context of public-inbox itself; I don't
recall public-inbox relies on $GIT_DIR/config much (if at all)
outside of standard git things.

Using ~/.public-inbox/config is required for multi-inbox lookups
(since you normally run MDA w/o args)

You can also override ~/.public-inbox/config by setting the
PI_CONFIG env (like GIT_CONFIG).

> I don't see a point to having {name} in ssoma-config settings though,
> since you're already in a single bucket by that point (using
> publicinbox.{name}.* makes sense in the multi-bucket
> ~/.public-inbox/config).
> 
> > > It's not updating automatically yet, but that will probably look
> > > like:
> > > 
> > > 1. Pull new mbox [4].
> > > 2. Import into notmuch-arcives [5].
> > > 3. Re-run public-inbox-index (this could probably be via ‘docker exec …’.
> > > 
> > > But I'll have to test that to confirm.  And ideally we'd be using
> > > ssoma-mda or similar directly, instead of going through mbox, but I'd
> > > rather get the official headers on the stored mail than be efficient
> > > ;).
> > 
> > For mirroring existing lists, I started using public-inbox-watch
> > which currently watches Maildirs.
> 
> If I had a Maildir locally, I'd just use procmail and push new
> messages into ssoma-mda.  I'm using the import script because my local
> mail has “how we delivered this to Trevor” headers (which I don't want
> to add) but the downloaded mbox has “how we delivered this to
> notmuch at notmuchmail.org” (which seems like a better fit for a shared
> ssoma repo).

I don't mind extra/different headers.   The majority of messages in
public-inbox.org/git/ has messages that were delivered to gmane;
recent ones are delivered to me, and some holes were filled in by
Jeff King's archives.  All of our mail systems add different
headers.

> > I recommend public-inbox-watch for mirroring existing lists (such as
> > what I did with git at vger) but public-inbox-mda for self-hosted lists
> > (such as meta at public-inbox.org).
> 
> Why is that?  Procmail + public-inbox-mda (or my Python ssoma-mda fork
> [1,2]) seems simpler and equally effective if you want to insert a
> message that your mail system is delivering locally.

-watch is usable for importing big archives or bursts of traffic
since it doesn't have to reload Perl/python on every mail (this
is probably not a problem for notmuch; but is for vger lists).
The defaults are also less-opinionated so it won't reject
attachments that passed through the list server.

Maildir with your MUA (in case you missed some earlier, and got
them from another user or archive).

There's also a Filter inferface I added (see
lib/PublicInbox/Filter/Vger.pm as an example) for dropping
list trailers before SA, so those trailers don't influence
Bayes, but you can do that in the MDA stage, too.


But *-mda is fine, too :>

> [1]: id:20141107190321.GL23609 at odin.tremily.us
> [2]: id:af679af8257e250ac606e35a1307ad02907b8426.1413663212.git.wking at tremily.us
>      http://public-inbox.org/meta/af679af8257e250ac606e35a1307ad02907b8426.1413663212.git.wking@tremily.us/t/#u