Re: This is how you import a mailing list archives (e.g. guix-patches) into mu4e

[Kyle Meyer]

On 12/05/22 09:45:41 +0100, zimoun wrote:
> Personally, I use “git clone” from a public-inbox instance [1].
>
>     git clone --mirror https://yhetil.org/guix-patches/1 \
>               guix-patches/git/1.git
>
> where ’1’ can be also replace by ’0’ for the very old ones.

In the case of guix-patches, there's not a 0.git.  I started it at 1.git
to leave open the possibility of adding 0.git with the messages I was
missing from the beginning of the list's history (from Feb 12, 2017 to
March 27, 2017).  I'm not sure I'm ever going to do so at this point
and, even if I did, reserving 0.git doesn't have much advantage over
just adding the old messages on top of the existing epoch, so I probably
should have just started it at 0.git.

> Then the conversion from Git commit to maildir is done by a small script
> [2], where all the job reads:
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>     # Extract the message from each commit in the range and store it
>     # in the Maildir for notmuch to consume.
>     $git rev-list $range | while read sha; do
>         # XXXX: fatal: path 'm' does not exist in <commit>
>         # and it can also raise issues with notmuch, as:
>         # Note: Ignoring non-mail file: $maildir/new/$sha

A tree can either have m or d ("deleted" messages):

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

So you should be able to avoid this error by skipping d's.

>       $git show $sha:m > $maildir/new/$sha
>     done
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> (Maybe better could be done and more robust are around.)

No need to change what works, of course, but
https://public-inbox.org/clients.html mentions l2md and impibe as tools
for converting public-inbox archives to Maildir.

 * https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dborkman/l2md.git
 * https://leahneukirchen.org/dotfiles/bin/impibe

In terms of cloning archives, plain cloning and fetching with Git is
fine, but, if you have public-inbox locally, you can instead use
public-inbox-clone and public-inbox-fetch, which will handle some
details for you (e.g, cloning underlying epochs and recognizing that new
epochs have been added):

 $ public-inbox-clone https://yhetil.org/guix-patches

Another option for fetching that's nice if you're mirror multiple repos
is grokmirror:

 * https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/grokmirror/grokmirror.git/about/
 * example setup for guix: 
https://yhetil.org/guix-patches/878scww903.fsf@kyleam.com/

Both grokmirror and public-inbox-clone/fetch make use of the manifests
that are published for public-inbox archives:

  $ curl -fSsL https://yhetil.org/manifest.js.gz | gzip -d | \
    jq -r 'keys | .[] | select(contains("guix"))'
  /guix-bugs/git/0.git
  /guix-devel/git/0.git
  /guix-patches/git/1.git
  /guix-science/git/0.git
  /guix-user/git/0.git

Then there's of course also public-inbox's lei (local email interface).
I won't get into that, but, for anyone interested, here are messages
where I've given some examples:

 * https://yhetil.org/emacs-devel/87wnh22w7o.fsf@kyleam.com
 * https://yhetil.org/guix-devel/87y1zcljq3.fsf@kyleam.com