Re: RFC: monthly epochs for v2

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 08:35:03PM +0000, Eric Wong wrote:
>Epoch size should be configurable, yes.  But I'm against time
>periods such as months or years being a factor for rollover.
>Many inboxes (including this one) can go idle for weeks/months;
>and activity can be unpredictable if there's surges.

Okay. It did just occur to me that the manifest file carries the 
"last-modified" stamp, so it's possible to figure out which repositories 
someone would need by parsing that data.

>> - if someone is only interested in a few months worth of archives, they
>> don't have to clone the entire collection
>> - similarly, someone using public-inbox to feed messages to their inbox
>> (e.g. using the l2md tool [1]) doesn't need to waste gigabytes storing
>> archives they aren't interested in
>
>NNTP or d:YYYYMMDD..YYYYMMDD mboxrd downloads via HTTP search
>are better suited for those cases.

I know you really like nntp, but I'm worried that with Big Corp's love 
of deep packet inspection and filtering, NNTP ports aren't going to be 
usable by a large subset of developers. We already have enough problems 
with port 9418 not being reachable (and sometimes not even port 22).  
Since usenet's descent into mostly illegal content, many corporate 
environments probably have ports 119 and 563 blocked off entirely and 
changing that would be futile.

>If people only want a backup via git (and not host HTTP/NNTP),
>it's FAR easier for them to run ubiquitous commands such as
>"git clone --mirror && git fetch" rather than
>"install $TOOL which may be out-of-date-or-missing-on-your-distro"

I think that anyone who is likely to use public-inbox repositories for 
more than just a copy of archives is likely to be using some kind of 
tool. I mean, SMTP can be used with "telnet" but nobody really does. :) 
If we provide a convenient library that supports things like intelligent 
selective cloning, indexing, fetching messages, etc, then that would 
avoid everyone doing it badly. In fact, libpublicinbox and bindings to 
most common languages is probably something that should happen early on.

-K