Re: brain dump detached/external index so far...

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 06:55:50AM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:
> Currently (and since the earliest days of this project
> supporting Xapian), indices were per-inbox.  This allowed
> inboxes to be isolated, making it easy to add and remove
> inboxes.
> 
> The detached/external indices will allows a merging of
> several existing inboxes into a single (or several)
> virtual inboxes.
> 
> Why?
> 
>   We want a cross-inbox search in the WWW UI,
>   and perhaps an "All Mail" IMAP/JMAP inbox.

FYI, this is the most often requested feature for lore.kernel.org, 
alongside with "give me a mbox.gz with all followups, regardless to 
which list they were sent."

I think several virtual inboxes makes more sense than always one global 
search, as people may want to search something like "all Linux kernel 
discussions" or "all gcc/compiler discussions". There could be different 
frontends to indicate which search is running -- e.g.  
"kernel.lore.kernel.org" vs. "gcc.lore.kernel.org".

> Advantages:
> 
>   Deduplication built-in.  Cross-posted messages only get
>   expensive Xapian data indexed once (multiple List-Id can
>   get attached to each message).

As an off-side grumbling, we found out that AWS SES (their email 
processing service) will force-rewrite all message IDs without any 
option to prevent this. So, a single message with multiple recipients 
will arrive with a unique Message-ID to each one of them.

This is so broken, it blows my mind, but AWS doesn't care to fix it.

> Disclaimer:
> 
>   My brain hasn't been working quite right...
>   Heat + pandemic + power outages + insects + poor air quality
>   have all been taking their toll :<

I hope things improve on the West Coast soon. The imagery alone was 
frightening to watch.

Best regards,
-K