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

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com> writes:

> [ +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 ]

Thanks for this response, Kyle (and thanks for public-inbox, Eric)!

>> 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.

Yup, Gmane hasn't had in-Gnus search since then.

> 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.

You wouldn't really use one backend (nnweb) to provide search support
for another (nntp). nnir can assign different search engines to
different backends -- what a "search engine" boils down to is a function
that accepts group search criteria, and returns groups and article
numbers (and optional relevance scoring) for matching messages. So if
public-inbox had some sort of an API that accepted a query and returned
the above information in some sort of easily-digestible format, it
wouldn't be hard to write a engine for it. Articles referenced in the
search results would then be retrieved via NNTP, so the article numbers
would need to correspond.

(Basically this is all the old Gmane search functionality did.)

> 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/>.

That would certainly be one approach! But not one that scales to many
users :)

>   * 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.

Yup, basically we'd just want a way to retrieve matching article numbers
that (ideally) didn't involve scraping a web page.

Thanks again,
Eric