Re: On the road to (GNU) debbugs support, some blockers

[Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>]

Jelle Licht writes:

> Thanks for working on piem, and sharing it under a free license!

You're welcome, and thanks for the feedback.

> the public-inbox-config man page (`man 5 public-inbox-config') demonstrates a
> url without trailing '/'. Piem's documentation uses an url with trailing '/'.
>
> It seems `piem-b4--get-am-files' assumes this url always has a trailing
> '/', which makes it not work for the examples used in the
> public-inbox-config manpage (and in particular, my pre-existing
> configuration). I'm not unsure if public inbox supports the trailing
> '/', but I see no reason to assume it would not.

public-inbox does work fine with the trailing slash, but I agree that
piem should not insist on the slash.  And confusingly I've been
inconsistent about it: the docstring of piem-inboxes says "this value
must end with a slash" but then several spots tack on a slash if needed.

I'll work on updating every spot that retrieves a URL to go through a
helper that appends a slash if needed (but I probably won't get a chance
to do that until this weekend).

> The second issue; in order to map (GNU) debbugs data to inbox
> configurations, the current best way I've worked out is to use the
> X-GNU-PR-Package header.

Have you tried using :listid?  For example, for guix-patches, I use
"guix-patches.gnu.org".

If X-GNU-PR-Package is better than List-Id for some users/cases, I'm
open to adding support for it.  It should be sufficient to teach
piem-inbox-by-header-match to consider that header (along with an
associated piem-inboxes key).

> Concretely, I've had to adjust `piem-gnus-get-inbox' to also take this
> particular mail header into account when trying to find matching
> configured inboxes. I am not aware of a way for debbugs users to be able
> to use this, without messing with non-debbugs users of gnus. Advice
> appreciated.

Hmm, I'm missing how it would mess with non-debbugs messages, at least
in the case of what I mentioned above.  X-GNU-PR-Package would be
considered when mapping to an inbox, but, for non-debbugs lists, the
other headers/criteria can still match.

> Third issue:
> The `piem-gnus-mid-to-thread' seems to prepend a line like: "From
> mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970" to entries. The issue comes up when we
> already have a line that starts with "From " at the top, which after
> running the `replace-regexp-in-string' boils down to something like in
> my generated m-piem file:
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
>>From unknown Sat May 27 07:31:53 2023
> [rest of file]
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

piem-gnus-mid-to-thread's goal is to construct an mbox (in mboxrd
format) from plain messages.  It looks like your input is already an
mbox.

That's not what I see when using Gnus (Emacs 28.2) with NNTP.  For
example, here's the mbox that I get when applying
<87y1l7fb9j.fsf@gnu.org1> from yhetil.gnu.guix.patches:

  $ grep -c '^From mboxrd@z' /tmp/piem-b4-u1rBSW/m-piem
  37
  $ grep '^From ' /tmp/piem-b4-u1rBSW/m-piem  | grep -cv mboxrd
  0

Can you give more details on your setup? For example, perhaps you're
working with mail rather than NNTP, and gnus-summary-display-article
displays that differently?

> Thanks for any help, and please let me know if you'd be interested
> patches for a (clean) integration with (GNU) debbugs.

Sure, I'd be happy to review patches for that.  Thanks.