Subject: Re: bug#66885: 29.1; gnus search with mu always returns empty

From: Britt Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2023 10:33:04 -0400

Thank you for your efforts so far, but I still cannot get it working.

Your recommendation for the remove-prefix didn't work for me. I
essentially tried incrementally going through the directory hierarchy
and never found a level that I could specify and it would work.

But even if I had, it would not be a very complete solution, because I
have numerous accounts with numerous user names that live under
~/home/britt/.local/share/mail~

there is a microsoft exchange email account, a protonmail account, a
gandi account ( and I have a few more that I haven't even set up yet).

I would really like to be able to search across those, and I can do this
with mu where it will show up all the emails it finds that meet the
search criteria.

It seems like that even if I could find a "remove-prefix" that would
have worked for that one particular search we tested that would not have
been the necessary prefix for searches in other folders/groups.

For right now I have gone back to using a local dovecot server to use
imap, and imap search is now good enough most of the time (with your
excellent work on standardizing the search command to use a common
structure).

I am happy to try again if you have some suggestions, but otherwise it
is probably reasonable to just close this and I will search with mu on
the command line on those few occassions where I cannot find what I need
with the built-in imap search functions.

Thank you. Britt

Eric Abrahamsen <[email-masked]> writes:

> Britt Anderson <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Copy and pasted the terminal output. mu is not expanding the 'tilde' in
>> "--muhome", but if I use the full path, then I do get a list of files
>> returned. However the error in the first form is not an empty search but
>> a database detection error. 
>
> That's fine, the value of config-directory is expand-file-name'd, so the
> tilde doesn't make it through to mu.
>
> Your problem is likely that your configuration doesn't include the
> correct `remove-prefix', a string prefix that is removed from the
> filenames returned by mu. The default is "~/Mail", which is wrong in
> your case, it looks like it should be
> "/home/britt/.local/share/mail/uwaterloo.ca/britt/archives".
>
> That will have to go in your config. Note that search-engine
> configuration options need to go inside the `gnus-search-engine' sexp --
> your previous `config-directory' config was outside, at the `nnmaildir'
> level. But that was the default value anyway, so you can leave it out.
> This should be sufficient:
>
> (setq gnus-secondary-select-methods
>       '((nnmaildir "mail"
> 		   (directory "/home/britt/.local/share/mail")
> 		   (gnus-search-engine gnus-search-mu
>                      (remove-prefix "/home/britt/.local/share/mail/uwaterloo.ca/britt/archives")))))
>
> The "(gnus) Search Engines" info manual has more detail.