Re: Relationship between public-inbox and ssoma?

["Nicolás Ojeda Bär" <n.oje.bar@gmail.com>]

Hello Eric,

Thanks for the prompt reply.  I am trying to migrate a long-lived
mailing list (65k messages over 26 years), below are some
troubles/questions I am having;
any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

- public-inbox-watch seems to struggle with very big maildirs; for now
I am moving the data into the maildir a little at a time and that
seems to work. Is there a particular obstacle
  to making the importing process more incremental?

- Trouble due to missing/malformed headers (mostly on very old
messages). For example, here is the header of a message that trips
public-inbox-watch:

From weis@margaux  Fri Nov 27 16:24:50 1992
Received: by margaux.inria.fr, Fri, 27 Nov 92 16:24:50 +0100
Message-ID: <9211271524.AA29971@margaux.inria.fr>
To: caml-list@margaux
Sender: weis@margaux
Status: O

The error is: fatal: Invalid rfc2822 date "" in ident:  <> (I guess
due to the lack of a Date: field). I added a Date: field just to test
and
noticed that Author: in the git commit was empty, I guess due to the
use of Sender: rather than From: header.

Do you think it is feasible to improve public-inbox-watch to try to
extract the date from some other header like above?
and to use Sender: when From: is not found?

- There are some messages that do not have Message-Id, but
public-inbox-watch seems to be able to handle them.
  Is it the case that Date: is the only header that is absolutely
necessary for public-inbox-watch to process the message?

- Does public-inbox-watch ever modify the message data?

- In general public-inbox-watch prints very little about what it is
doing, which makes it hard(er) to trace problems; a verbose flag would
be a nice
  addition, I think.

Thanks!

Best wishes,
Nicolás

On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 3:07 AM, Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> wrote:
> Nicolás Ojeda Bär <n.oje.bar@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Thanks very much for this great project.
>>
>> I am a bit puzzled about the difference between public-inbox and ssoma. In particular:
>>
>> - What is the difference between public-inbox-mda and ssoma-mda ?
>
> public-inbox-mda is more suitable for public endpoints where
> it's the primary entry point for a publically-shared mail.
> ssoma-mda is/was intended for personal mail.  Originally,
> public-inbox depended on and used ssoma, but that was given up
> for more performance.
>
> Sidenote: I don't recommend public-inbox-mda for running
> _mirrors_ of existing mailing lists since it's stricter than
> what most lists accept.  public-inbox-watch is more lenient and
> more performant (on Linux with inotify, at least); so I wrote
> it for mirroring.
>
>> - Are the git repository formats the same for public-inbox and ssoma ?
>
> Currently they are the same with one exception: ssoma allows two
> different messages (different blob SHA-1) to have the same
> Message-Id by default; public-inbox (current version) does not.
> (ssoma-mda has a "-1" option to disable duplicate Message-Id).
>
> The work-in-progress "v2" public-inbox format diverges and I
> don't currently have plans to port ssoma to use it.  The v1
> format will remain supported in public-inbox.
>
> I'm not sure if ssoma is worth the effort any more, as it's too
> much effort to promote a new sync protocol (even if based on
> git).  I'd rather improve NNTP servers and clients as an option
> for people to read public inboxes.
>
>> Any comments appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks a lot!
>
> No problem, thanks for your interest.