Subscribing to lore lists with grokmirror

You can have lore.kernel.org mailing lists delivered right into your inbox straight from the git archive (in fact, this will work for any public-inbox server, not just for lore.kernel.org). It's efficient and (optionally) preserves a full copy of entire list archives on your system — should you wish to keep them.

Note: this requires grokmirror-2.0.2+, as earlier versions do not come with the grok-pi-piper utility.

Installing grokmirror-2.0

Easiest is to install from pip:

pip install --user grokmirror~=2.0.2

You may have grokmirror available from your distro packages, too, but make sure it's version 2.0.2 or above.

Installing procmail

Procmail should be available with your distribution, so install it like any other package.

Configuring procmail

Procmail configuration can easily be a topic for a whole book in itself, but if you just want to have messages delivered into your inbox, all you have to do is create a ~/.procmailrc with the following contents:

DEFAULT=$HOME/Mail/

# Don't deliver duplicates sent to multiple lists
:0 Wh: .msgid.lock
| formail -D 8192 .msgid.cache

If your mailbox is not in ~/Mail, then you should adjust the above accordingly.

Configuring grokmirror

Create a ~/.config/lore.conf with the following contents. We'll use three lists as examples: git, linux-hardening, and linux-doc, but you'll obviously want to use the lists you care about. You can see which lists are available from https://lore.kernel.org/lists, or the exact git repositories on https://erol.kernel.org/.

[core]
toplevel = ~/.local/share/grokmirror/lore
log = ${toplevel}/grokmirror.log

[remote]
site = https://lore.kernel.org
manifest = https://lore.kernel.org/manifest.js.gz

[pull]
post_update_hook = ~/.local/bin/grok-pi-piper -c ~/.config/pi-piper.conf
refresh = 300
include = /git/*
          /linux-hardening/*
          /linux-doc/*

The above assumes that you installed grokmirror with pip install --user. Now make the toplevel directory for the git repos:

$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/grokmirror/lore

Configuring pi-piper

The last step is to create ~/.config/pi-piper.conf:

[DEFAULT]
pipe = /usr/bin/procmail
shallow = yes

The important bit here is shallow = yes. Public-inbox stores every mail message as a separate commit, so once a message is piped to procmail and delivered, we usually don't care about keeping a copy of that commit any more. If you set shallow = yes, pi-piper will prune all but the last successfully processed commit out of your local git copy by turning those repos into shallow git repositories. This helps to greatly save disk space, especially for large archives.

If you do want to keep full archives, then don't set shallow. You can change your mind at any time by running git fetch _grokmirror master --unshallow in each underlying git repository (you can find them in ~/.local/share/grokmirror/lore/).

You can also specify the shallow option per list:

[DEFAULT]
pipe = /usr/bin/procmail

[linux-hardening]
shallow = yes

Running grok-pull

You can now run grok-pull to get the initial repo copies. Note, that during the first run grokmirror will perform full clones even if you specified shallow = yes in the pi-piper config, so it may take some time for large archives like those for the git list. However, once the pi-piper hook runs, they will be repacked to almost nothing. Future versions of grokmirror may become smarter about this and perform shallow clones from the beginning.

During the initial pi-piper run, there will be no mail delivered, as it will just perform initial setup and make a note where the HEAD is pointing. If you run grok-pull again, two things may happen:

  1. There will be no changes and grok-pull will exit right away
  2. If there are changes, they will be fetched and the hook will deliver them to procmail (and to your inbox)

Running in the background

You can run grok-pull in the background, where it will check for updates as frequently as the refresh setting says (300 seconds in the example above).

You can either background it “the old way”:

grok-pull -o -c ~/.config/lore.conf &

Or the new way, using a systemd user service:

$ cat .config/systemd/user/grok-pull@.service

[Unit]
Description=Grok-pull service for %I
ConditionPathExists=%h/.config/%i.conf

[Service]
ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/grok-pull -o -c %h/.config/%i.conf
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

$ systemctl --user enable grok-pull@lore
$ systemctl --user start grok-pull@lore

If you make changes to ~/.config/lore.conf, for example to add new lists, you will need to restart the service:

$ systemctl --user restart grok-pull@lore

Combining with mbsync

You can totally combine this with mbsync and deliver into the same local inbox. As a perk, any messages injected from grokmirror will be uploaded to your remote imap mailbox. See this post from mcgrof about configuring mbsync:

Troubles

Email tools@linux.kernel.org if you have any trouble getting the above to work. The grok-pi-piper utility is fairly new, so it's entirely possible that it's full of bugs.