Subject: [sup-talk] Introduction, thanks, and a small patch

From: [email-masked] (Igor Brkic)
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:18:33 +0200

Excerpts from Carl Worth's message of Sub Kol 15 06:14:46 +0200 2009:
> PS. I'm sending this message from mutt since sup crashed when I tried
> to send the message (see exception output below). I think this is one

Hi Carl!

I had same problem with sup. Sup actually manages to send message before
crashing and then it crashes when indexing sent messages.

Solution that worked for me is to comment out line "Time.parse time, 0"
in mbox.rb file. This is not good solution, more like a hack, but for
some reason it works for me. Try it out.

I tried to find out why this is happening, but I'm not so familiar with 
sup internals (and not so good in ruby too) and didn't come to any conclusion.

Igor

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From: [email-masked] (Marc Weber)
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:03:00 +0200

>    1. Most text is white-on-white (invisible) if the default terminal
>       background color is white. I would suggest that the default
>       background color be changed from "default" to "black" to avoid
>       this trap.

The bg colour is set to black somewhere but for some reason it doesn't
work here. I've switched my terminal bg colour to light green so that I
can still read all text. It's a little bit annoying though. So if you
can tell me how to make sup background black I'd be happy.

I haven't taken the time yet to investigate the issue.

Sincerly
Marc Weber

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From: [email-masked] (Carl Worth)
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 07:35:02 -0700

> Hi Carl!

Hi Igor!

> crashing and then it crashes when indexing sent messages.

Ah, yes. I did notice afterwards that my original message did make it
to the list. So sorry for all the noise, (though my first send of the
patch did have some debug junk in it, so I suppose it's good I sent a
cleaner version).

> some reason it works for me. Try it out.

Thanks. I gave this a try, but it didn't work for me. I'm also not
much for debugging ruby so I haven't made much progress here yet. (Is
there anything like gdb for ruby? If I could just march up the stack
and more easily find where m.date should be initialized to non-nil
then that might help).

But thanks for describing the bug more accurately for mo. At least
knowing that the crash is happening while indexing ~/.sup/sent.mb I
was able to just move that out of the way for now, so I can at least
run sup again.

And actually, this brings up another point for that missing reference
manual. How can I configure sup to deliver sent messages to a maildir
instead of an mbox? (I'd prefer that anyway, and it just might
workaround this bug.)

Thanks for the warm welcome,

-Carl
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From: [email-masked] (Carl Worth)
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 07:41:51 -0700

> I haven't taken the time yet to investigate the issue.

I did my color configuration according to the following page:

http://sup.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?CustomizingColors

That provides this very useful command which reads all the default
color settings and puts them into a configuration file that you can
easily edit:

ruby -rubygems -rsup -e 'print Redwood::Colormap::DEFAULT_COLORS.to_yaml' > ~/.sup/colors.yaml

You know, I don't think it would be a crazy idea for sup to
automatically dump that there on its first run. Or perhaps better,
sup-config could do it, (and could even ask if the user would prefer a
black-on-white or a white-on-black default color scheme).

-Carl
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From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:22:56 -0700

Reformatted excerpts from Igor Brkic's message of 2009-08-15:
> Solution that worked for me is to comment out line "Time.parse time,
> 0" in mbox.rb file. This is not good solution, more like a hack, but
> for some reason it works for me. Try it out.

I've think I've fixed this in master. Thanks for your log; that was
helpful. The problem was that Sup was producing the date component of
the From_ lines in the sent mail mbox using the current locale, and
later on wouldn't necessarily recognize that as a date. (Particularly
for people with "funny locales".)

You will have to manually edit your ~/.sup/sent.mbox file and change all
the From_ line dates that are not in UTC to UTC. If there are just a
couple, you should be able to copy and paste from the Date: header a few
lines below.

Removing the Time.parse line you mention will work, but it has the side
effect of potentially splitting mbox files in mid-message. E.g. if you
ever have a line of text like "From xxx yyy\n", Sup will consider that
a message delimiter. This is fallout from the great mbox From_ line
misdesign of 1972.

Please let me know if it works for you.
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>

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From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:38:31 -0700

Reformatted excerpts from Carl Worth's message of 2009-08-14:
> Hi. My name's Carl, and I've uh, been collecting email for 12 years.

Hi Carl! Welcome.

>    background color be changed from "default" to "black" to avoid

Complaining about the colors already? You're fitting right in around
here.

We recently changed it from black to default in order to make it work
for people with transparent terminals. Since there's clearly not a
setting that works for everyone, I think the best solution is your
suggestion in a later email: provide a few reasonable color schemes
directly in sup-sync.

> I've attached a patch to fix this second issue, (a single-character
> change).

Great, thanks. The patch looks good but I think you left a debugging
puts call in there. If you want to resubmit,  I will apply this.

> I love the NewUserGuide, but I've needed a ReferenceManual for various
> issues already, (configuring colors, configuring SMTP, understanding
> the sources.yaml file well enough to be able to re-process mail that
> was mis-labelled the first time, etc.).

Agree. This would be very valuable and is currently a sore spot, IMO.

> One potential issue is that I don't see any explicit license terms on
> the wiki. Can I assume that any text on the wiki is suitable for
> putting into a document to be contributed to and distributed with sup?

I think it's fair to assume that anyone contributing to a wiki for an
open-source product knows what they're getting into. So, yes.

Of course, if anyone objects to their wiki content being distributed as
part of Sup (which is currently distributed under GPL v2), please speak
now!

> I really like the ideas William has posted on his blog about
> separating the interface from the guts of sup, (to make the new STS).
> I'd be happy to help with that as well if possible.

Although it's been over a year of vaporware promises, this is slowly
happening. I have a protocol defined and a simple server written. Recent
work on replacing Ferret with Xapian has actually been helpful in terms
of moving us away from Ferretisms. Expect something "soon".

> NoMethodError from thread: main
> undefined method `to_indexable_s' for nil:NilClass

This should now be fixed in git master; see my previous email in this
thread. (You will have to manually edit your sent.mbox a bit.)
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>

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From: [email-masked] (Igor Brkic)
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:18:22 +0200

Excerpts from William Morgan's message of Sun Aug 16 23:22:56 +0200 2009:
> ...

I've made changes and for now it works like a charm. Thanks!

Igor