Re: This is how you import a mailing list archives (e.g. guix-patches) into mu4e

[Kyle Meyer]

zimoun writes:

> I fetch from yhetil.org (Git) and then convert to MailDir because I use
> Notmuch as indexer (and reader :-)).  And I do not want to duplicate the
> storage.  Therefore, after fetching and converting, the Git repo is
> garbage collected,
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
>       echo $head > $gitdir/shallow
>       $git gc --quiet --prune=all
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> https://gitlab.com/zimoun/my-conf/-/blob/master/.local/bin/sync-public-inboxes.sh#L94-99
>
> For instance, the current size of guix-patches on my machine is 152K
> compared to the complete guix-patches Git repo of 277M.

Nice.  Maintaining a shallow clone certainly makes sense.

> Well, I have not investigated much with ’grokmirror’ and
> ’public-inbox-fetch’ and maybe it would also work smoothly with the same
> trick; avoiding many manual plumbing.

I haven't used it myself (unsurprisingly I have an interest in keeping
yhetil.org's inboxes replicated on my local machine), but I think you
can keep grokmirror clones shallow by hooking up its grok-pi-piper to
the post-update hook. Here's a relevant bit from grokmirror's docs:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
[DEFAULT]
# To start piping public-inbox messages into your inbox, simply
# install procmail and add the following line to your ~/.procmailrc:
#     DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
# You can now read your mail with "mutt -f ~/Maildir/"
pipe = /usr/bin/procmail
# Once you've successfully piped the messages, you generally
# don't need them any more. If you set shallow = yes, then
# the repository will be configured as "shallow" and all succesffully
# processed messages will be pruned from the repo.
# This will greatly reduce disk space usage, especially on large archives.
# You can always get any number of them back, e.g. by running:
# git fetch _grokmirror master --deepen 100
shallow = yes
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---