Selective lei filters and replies to old threads

["Toke Høiland-Jørgensen" <toke@redhat.com>]

Hi everyone

I've been happily using lei in place of mailing list subscriptions for a
while now, but ran into an issue recently while trying to limit the
volume of email, which I am hoping someone has a good solution for:

Basically, what I was trying to do was to avoid following the firehose
of patches that is netdev@vger, and instead selectively pull in patches
for the areas I care about (which mostly boils down to avoiding all the
driver-only patches). To achieve this, I've set up a lei search using
the handy dfn: prefix for searches. In simplified form I've gone from a
search like:

q = l:netdev.vger.kernel.org AND rt:1.month.ago..

to

q = dfn:net/core/* AND rt:1.month.ago...

(my full query has a few more terms but this is enough to illustrate the
problem).

Now, the above query works beautifully to bring down the volume of
patches to a more manageable level (phew), but I have run into a problem
with follow-ups, which I'll try to describe as I understand it:

I'm using the --threads parameter to 'lei q' which nicely pulls down the
whole thread whenever one patch in the series matches[0]. However, if a
reply shows up later, which does not in itself match the dfn: query, but
is part of a thread that does, this reply will only be downloaded if the
original thread still matches[1]. Which it doesn't necessarily do
anymore because of the time limit parameter added by lei which only
pulls in new emails since the last one downloaded.

I can get around the default lei time limit by adding
--remote-fudge-time=1.month to 'lei up', but that makes lei pull in
thousands of mails on every update, which seems a bit wasteful. And I'll
still miss replies to threads that are older than the 1-month time
limit.

So really I think what I'm looking for is a way to construct a query
that uses the send time of the individual (reply) messages, but applies
the dfn: match to the whole thread. Is there a way to do that? And/or
does anyone have any other neat tricks they are using to construct a
similar selective mail feed without missing stuff? :)

-Toke



[0] Side note: if anyone has a nice trick to specifically exclude Greg's
stable patch bombs from this, I would be interested in hearing about
that as well :)

[1] An example: I was missing this reply in my local mailbox even though
the original thread was there:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/64dcf5834c4c8_23f1f8294fa@willemb.c.googlers.com.notmuch/
Adding the --remote-fudge-time parameter pulled it in.