Re: public inbox for groff

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Alex,

On Tue, 2025-04-01 at 12:18 +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 12:11:53PM +0200, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 05:35:40PM +0200, Alejandro Colomar via Overseers 
> > wrote:
> > > The public inbox of gcc@ doesn't replace the archive, but rather
> > > complement it.  That is, there exit both the archive and the public
> > > inbox.  I expect the same would be possible here.
> > > 
> > > (On the other hand, it would be interesting to learn how one can
> > >  dowload mbox from a public inbox, because in vger.kernel.org we only
> > >  have a public inbox.)
> > 
> > At least on inbox.sourceware.org you can download the result of any
> > search as mbox. And search is fairly powerful. See e.g.
> > https://inbox.sourceware.org/libc-alpha/_/text/help/
> > 
> > So for example to get all message from the last week you'll do:
> > https://inbox.sourceware.org/libc-alpha/?q=d%3Alast.week..  And then
> > at the top you can download the result as mbox (with or without full
> > message threads).
> 
> Thanks!  That's useful.
> 
> > 
> > Also if you want to download a whole message thread containing a
> > specific message-id you can fetch
> > https://inbox.sourceware.org/libc-alpha/<Message-ID>/t.mbox.gz
> 
> Is it possible to download the entire history?  I once cloned a git
> repository for a public-inbox, thinking that it would look like a
> maildir or an mbox, but it looks like every mail removes the previous
> one (or something weird).

Yes, it is one message per commit, see the GIT TREE LAYOUT in 
https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox-v2-format.html

If you want to get really fancy you can use lei
https://public-inbox.org/lei-overview.html
Or the Emacs tools and glue for working with public-inbox archives piem
https://git.kyleam.com/piem/tree/README

Cheers,

Mark