inbox indexing wishlist [was: [TOPIC 16/17] “I want a reviewer”]

[Eric Wong <e@yhbt.net>]

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 09:25:31PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:
> 
> > > 6. Peff: this is all possible on the mailing list. I see things that look
> > > interesting, and have a to do folder. If someone replies, I’ll take it off
> > > the list. Once a week go through all the items. I like the book club idea,
> > > instead of it being ad hoc, or by me, a group of a few people review the
> > > list in the queue. You might want to use a separate tool, like IRC, but it
> > > would be good to have it bring it back to the mailing list as a summary.
> > > Public inbox could be better, but someone needs to write it. Maybe nerd
> > > snipe Eric?
> > 
> > What now? :o
> > 
> > There's a lot of things it could be better at, but a more
> > concrete idea of what you want would help.
> 
> short answer: searching for threads that only one person participated in

+Cc meta@public-inbox.org

OK, something I've thought of doing anyways in the past...

> The discussion here was around people finding useful things to do on the
> list: triaging or fixing bugs, responding to questions, etc. And I said
> my mechanism for doing that was to hold interesting-looking but
> not-yet-responded-to mails in my git-list inbox, treating it like a todo
> list, and then eventually:
> 
>   1. I sweep through and spend time on each one.
> 
>   2. I see that somebody else responded, and I drop it from my queue.
> 
>   3. It ages out and I figure that it must not have been that important
>      (I do this less individually, and more by occasionally declaring
>      bankruptcy).
> 
> That's easy for me because I use mutt, and I basically keep my own list
> archive anyway. But it would probably be possible to use an existing
> archive and just search for "threads with only one author from the last
> 7 days". And people could sweep through that[1].
> 
> You already allow date-based searches, so it would really just be adding
> the "thread has only one author" search. It's conceptually simple, but
> it might be hard to index (because of course it may change as messages
> are added to the archive, though any updates are bounded to the set of
> threads the new messages are in).

Exactly on being conceptually simple but requiring some deeper
changes to the way indexing works.  I'll have to think about it
a bit, but it should be doable without being too intrusive,
invasive or expensive for existing users.

> But to be clear, I don't think you have any obligation here. I just
> wondered if it might be interesting enough that you would implement it
> for fun. :) As far as I'm concerned, if you never implemented another
> feature for public-inbox, what you've done already has been a great
> service to the community.

Thanks.  I'll keep that index change in mind and it should be
doable if I remain alive and society doesn't collapse...

> [1] The obvious thing this lacks compared to my workflow is a way to
>     mark threads as "seen" or "not interesting". But that implies
>     per-user storage.

Yeah, that would be part of the local tools bit I've been
thinking about (user labels such as "important", "seen",
"replied", "new", "ignore", ... flags).