Re: New mailing list archive at https://orgmode/list/

[Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>]

[ +cc Eric Wong, mostly to say thanks for all the work he puts into
  public-inbox, which is the software behind these archives, but also so
  that he can correct me if I misrepresent any capabilities of or plans
  for public-inbox ]

> Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> with Kyle's help, I've set up a new mailing list archive:
>>
>> https://orgmode/list/
>>
>> References in https://orgmode.org and https://orgmode.org/list
>> that pointed to gmane.org are now using this, so many links are
>> functional again.
>
> Cool! I note that there's also NNTP access at news.yhetil.org, in
> addition to gmane.io. Does yhetil have a search interface, or are there
> other mechanisms for searching the archives (ideally in Gnus :))?

The web interface (<https://orgmode.org/list> or
<https://yhetil.org/orgmode>) is the main mechanism for searching.  You
don't necessarily have to leave Emacs for that, as public-inbox's pages
render nicely in EWW.  But of course that's not the Gnus-based search
you're hoping for.

I use Gnus to follow some lists via NNTP, a mix of public-inbox archives
and gmane.io, but I've never really done any fancy searching from it and
don't use Gnus for my mail.  To try it out, I hit GG to search on a
gmane.io list, but got an error [^1], so I suppose its search capability
went away with Gmane's HTTP interface.

Poking around a bit, I guess nnweb.el would be the main place that
public-inbox's web search could be integrated into Gnus?  I've been
(slowly) working on an Emacs package [^2] that adds public-inbox-related
functionality to different "endpoints" (currently Notmuch, Gnus, EWW,
Elfeed), and I'd be interested in any ideas for improving the Gnus
support.

A couple of other notes:

  * You can get the entire archive locally with a 'git clone', in which
    case you can transform it into a form that can be indexed/searched
    however you prefer (including with public-inbox, running a local
    public-inbox-httpd).  There are some pointers on extracting an
    archive to a Maildir at
    <https://public-inbox.org/meta/20200426060542.GA15896@dcvr/>.

  * In the message above, Eric W. mentions that he is considering
    working on client tools with mairix-like search results.  That'd
    make the search capabilities available locally, and I'd imagine
    something like that could be nicely integrated with Gnus,
    considering it already has a mairix backend to use as a guide.


[^1] open-network-stream: search.gmane.org/80 Name or service not known

     This was with Emacs 26.3, and it seems like this interface went
     away entirely in Emacs 27 with 37f0f114df (Remove the Gmane backend
     from nnir, 2018-04-11).

[^2] https://git.kyleam.com/piem/about/