Re: Some points on public-inbox

[Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org>]

Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> writes:

> Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> over the last few days I've set up a public-inbox 1.1.0pre1 instance,
>> and noticed some things:
>
> Hey Leah, thanks for giving it a try!  Sorry for the late reply,
> been trying to avoid being at the computer too much for health
> reasons.

No problem, get well soon.

>> 1) Makefile.PL only works properly when run from a checkout, not a tarball.
>> I replaced the beginning with
>> 
>> my @EXE_FILES = split("\n", `printf '%s\n' script/* 2>/dev/null`);
>> my $PM_FILES = `find lib 2>/dev/null`;
>
> Thanks, I'd probably add "-name '*.pm'" to find(1) to filter out
> directories.  But I wonder if it's better to grep the MANIFEST
> file...

Yes, using MANIFEST is a better solution.

>> 2) public-inbox-mda returns with status 1 when it gets a mail it
>> doesn't know where to deliver to.  I think status 67 would be more
>> appropriate (EX_NOUSER).
>
> Sure.  There's a bunch of places where we just die() and ignore
> sysexits.h or similar.  Could use some help checking for that
> and patches are welcome :>

I'll have a look at this.

>> 3) IPv6 support needs the Socket6 module, this is not stated anywhere.
>
> Oops, I thought this was standard :x  Care to send a patch to
> INSTALL for that?

Will do.

>> 5) Is there a way for the HTML view to list all served lists?
>
> Not currently...  I'm not sure how the UI or configuration
> should be or how to avoid clutter/scalability problems with many
> inboxes.  NNTP has standardized commands and clients can decide
> how to show them, at least.

Yes, I was thinking of just having a list of "name - description",
straight from the config file?

>> / results in 404.  How did you add links to meta/ and test/ on
>> https://public-inbox.org/ ?
>
> mkdir /srv/public-inbox/{meta,test} # static directory listing

I built something similar with nginx now.

>> and use /etc/aliases to route the lists that are hosted primarily on
>> the server to it.  What's the best approach to do this for mailing
>> lists I only mirror? Subscribe with a "secret" second address to the
>> list, and add this second adress to publicinbox.<name>.address?
>> Or can public-inbox-mda also scan for List-Id etc and sort by it somehow?
>
> I prefer to use public-inbox-watch for mirroring existing lists.
>
> -mda is also a bit strict and opinionated (though I have plans to
> make it less so, optionally), so it's mainly for non-mirrored
> inboxes.
>
> -watch is also safer and less likely to lose/bounce mail since
> it hits a Maildir, first.  -watch will scan for List-Id (or any
> other header, such as X-Mailing-List) and put it into the
> correct inbox.  If space is a problem, a cronjob to remove
> old files will help, but maybe it can unlink-on-import-commit
> in the future.

Space is not an issue, and scanning for special headers will avoid
getting password reminders and administrative messages into the archive.

I'll use watch then.


During testing, we also found another thing when obscure characters
are used in Message-IDs, esp. / and ?.

E.g. using a Message-ID of <F1WYEAZPOF.3LOD2T7ZHY9I1@localdomain/raw/T>
will create a corrupt link.  Some more "ideas" are at
https://inbox.vuxu.org/pi-test/


Thanks,
-- 
Leah Neukirchen  <leah@vuxu.org>  http://leah.zone