bug: chokes on long directory names (was: Re: out of memory on idle machine)

[Gregor Zattler]

Hi David, Olly, notmuch and xapian developers,
* David Bremner <david at tethera.net> [11. Feb. 2021]:
> David Bremner <david at tethera.net> writes:
> As a kind of desperation move, you could try bisecting your mailstore,
> to see how small of a set of messages you can duplicate the problem
> with.

this I did, somehow.  I found the culprit: It's a maildir
with one single mail in it.  The name of the maildir is
exceptionally long [because generated from a List-Id:
-Header] and the mail arrived at the very day, my notmuch
database corrupted.  This maildir alone provokes that every
next notmuch new will rescan all (?) files.

Then I tried to only index this maildir, it showed the same
strange re-indexing but even when running notmuch new for a
while in a loop (>1000 times), the database showed no
corruption.

When instead I shorten the name of the maildir to three
characters with the very same email file in it, nothing
happens, it indexes the file once and not again.

Then I prolonged the name of the file instead of the
directory and even with the longest possible filename (or
path?)

/home/grfz/Mail/nuk/new/1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no1607641473.31514_2.no16076414734160.14_2.no

notmuch has no problem indexing this and not to reindex it
in the next run.


So notmuch or xapian (I don't know) chokes on extreme long
directory names.  I consider this to be a bug.



My scripts create this long names from List-Id and some
such.  The one which triggered the problems is from an online
shop:

u+mq6tamjqhe3cm2j5giydembrgiytamrtga2deojogexdsmzygm4egnbuifatcnrsgazdejjugbzgkylmfvxw43djnzsxg2dpoaxgizjgna6ton3bg4zdsobsgmytczlcme3dentehaydmnjxmy4doyrwha4tgobgoi6xizlmmvtxeylqnastimdhnv4c43tfoqthipldovzxi33nmvzhgllxmvwgg33nmu at real-onlineshop.de/

Since, as I tested, this can be reproduced with the simplest
of email in a maildir with an extremly long name, I do not
attach the maildir in question.  But if anyone wants it I
can send it.



I then had a look at other long directory names and there is
another one which also triggers the problem, it also has
only one email in it and arrived on 12th of January:

u+mq6wcodfgmygcjtjhuzdamrrgaytemjrhe2dqmbqfyys4mbxgazugnbsie3doobsgfcdmobfgqygg5ltorxw2zlsomxgo2lunrqweltdn5wsm2b5mu3tkmddhbrdoyrwgvsgeobymi2dszbtg4zdamztmm4dsmzvgjssm4r5orswyzlhojqxa2bfgqygo3lyfzxgk5bgoq6xa4tjozqwg6i at customers.gitlab.com


Since I removed both on my laptop, notmuch new works again,
yeah!  Now I will have a look on my .procmailrc.

Thanks for your attention, thanks for notmuch and for xapian,
Grgeor

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