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

From: Britt Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2023 16:33:11 -0500

Eric Abrahamsen <[email-masked]> writes:

>
> The remove-prefix should delete the file path up to the level of the
> server, meaning that the group/folder name will be read as the first
> filepath segment _after_ the removal.
>
> In theory, if you have multiple mail installations all indexed by mu,
> and those installations are represented by multiple Gnus backends, it
> could still work. If each backend was configured with a separate
> remove-prefix, then it could only extract the results that were relevant
> to that backend. I don't think that would currently work correctly,
> though.
>

Eric, I don't if this helps, but I have kept fiddling around with this.
I decided to watch the ~gnus-search-mu-remove-prefix~ variable with this
in my .gnus.el file:

	(nnmaildir "b3l-archives"
		   (directory "/home/britt/.local/share/mail/b3l.xyz/britt/archives")
		   (gnus-search-engine gnus-search-mu
				       (remove-prefix "/home/britt/.local/share/mail/b3l.xyz/britt/archives")))

There is a maildir "y2023" that lives in archives. Using gnus I can read
the mail in there.

Before I start gnus none of the gnus-* variables are available from C-h
v.

After I start gnus I can see many of them, but not the gnus-search-*
variables.

After I go into gnus and try to perform a search on that directory then
the gnus-search variables become visible. When I do C-h v
gnus-search-mu-remove-prefix it still shows "/home/britt/Mail" even
though the remove prefix was set above. Is my syntax bad somehow?

I have tried manually to setq that variable to remove the prefix you
advised in an earlier email. But search still doesn't work even though
C-h v shows that my new value is the variable's current value. 

Just hoping this may give you an idea where the trouble lies. Still
working hard to get back to gnus again.

Thanks, Britt