Help wanted for mumi (issues.guix.gnu.org)

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hello Guix,

our bug tracker web interface at issues.guix.gnu.org could really
benefit from a more reliable, faster search.

Currently, mumi (the application behind issues.guix.gnu.org) uses a slow
interface to Debbugs, the bug tracker service that runs at
debbugs.gnu.org.  The search isn’t great as it returns duplicates and is
paginated, which makes it unsuitable for processing.  Mumi may need to
further filter the search results by status or activity, or any other
metric that the Debbugs search API doesn’t let us do.

So I decided to switch away from using the Debbugs API and instead
operate on a *local* copy of all messages that reach Debbugs.  Debbugs
operates on email messages, and luckily it allows us to download these
original messages.  Whenever someone visits an issue page, all related
messages are downloaded by mumi, so it amasses a sizeable stash of
emails over time.

Mumi is using a modified version of “mu”, the mail indexer and search
tool, to continuously index the contents of all messages.  (“mu” is
modified only so that the issue number is indexed alongside the message
contents.)

Unfortunately, that’s as far as I got before life intervened.  The next
step is really close, but getting there requires more contiguous
segments of time than I can free at the moment.  We really only need to
do the following things next:

1) keep updating the mu database as new messages are stored
2) using the mu Guile bindings to search messages via mu instead of
using the slow Debbugs API.

While working on 2 we may find that more properties should be stored in
the mu database, and that’s fine.  Our variant of mu is easily patched
to accomodate our needs.

Does anyone here have an interest in playing with and improving mumi?
It’s a very simple code base and it’s very easy to get started.

The code is here:

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

--
Ricardo