Mumi now uses raw emails and Mu

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hey there,

I just wanted to let y’all know that Mumi at issues.guix.gnu.org now
stores raw emails from Debbugs instead of fetching them through the
Debbugs SOAP service.  This means that messages are no longer truncated,
which is what happened to some multipart messages in the past.

While I don’t think Mu is directly suitable for Mumi, I added Mu as a
dependency for now, and I’m indexing all emails in regular intervals.
This can be used to speed up the message search.  If you want to
implement this, I’d be happy to receive patches!

The code for Mumi can be found here:

    https://git.elephly.net/software/mumi.git

Going forward I think it would be better to use Xapian directly.  Then
we could store more relevant information in the database, such as the
Debbugs bug number to which a certain message relates.  I would like to
be able to almost instantaneously answer these questions:

* which of our issues have seemingly been forgotten?
* which have been ignored?
* which issues involve a certain person?
* what issues match this text query?

Since we’re interested in issues (not individual messages) these
questions cannot quickly be answered with Mu.  To compute the issue
number from a message requires parsing it and I’d much rather do this at
index time.

I guess we could even just fork Mu and make it store additional
information in its database.

If you’d like to take part in this effort to make Mumi more useful to
all of us, please reply to this message.

--
Ricardo