Re: blog post on gnus, dovecot, and lucene

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Vincent Bernat <bernat@luffy.cx> writes:

>  ❦  8 octobre 2014 00:30 +0800, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> :
>
>>> Note that you don't have to run dovecot as a server. You can run it as a
>>> process. In mbsyncrc: 
>>>
>>> Tunnel "/usr/lib/dovecot/imap -o mail_location=maildir:~/.mbsync/mails/XXXXX"
>>>
>>> In Gnus:
>>>
>>> #+BEGIN_SRC elisp
>>> (nnimap-stream shell)
>>> (nnimap-shell-program "/usr/lib/dovecot/imap -o mail_location=maildir:~/.mbsync/mails/XXXXX")
>>> #+END_SRC
>>
>> Yes, hence the section titled "The Problem" in that blog post :) Perhaps
>> I could have made that clearer!
>
> Oh, it was pretty clear but I didn't read from the beginning because I
> thought this was a post about reading mails offline with full text
> search available! ;-)
>
>> So far as I can tell, if you're calling dovecot as a process, you can't
>> integrate lucene text indexing -- that only works when running dovecot
>> as a daemon.
>>
>> In fact that was the whole impetus for the shift, and the blog post:
>> going from dovecot-the-process to dovecot-the-daemon, because of the
>> need for search indexing.
>
> I didn't notice that. I added that to my dovecot.conf:
>
> plugin {
>   fts = lucene
>   fts_lucene = whitespace_chars=@.
> }
>
> And the search became faster. However, I usually don't use FTS (only
> search on recipient or title). If I check right now, I notice that the
> indexes are not up-to-date. So, you may be right.

But it's pretty interesting that that did something -- I wasn't sure
that calling dovecot as a process would even invoke the configuration
files at all. But you don't think the indexes were updated, huh?

It might be worth amending the blog post at some point. I've asked about
this stuff on the dovecot mailing list, but no one seemed to know.

E