A shell script for creating web archives for mlmmj mailing lists. Mlmmj-archivist generates the web archives for the public mailing lists of GFOSS (ΕΕΛ/ΛΑΚ), available at https://lists.ellak.gr/.

• Supports flat and hierarchical mailing list directory structures; eg. both /var/spool/mlmmj/listname and /var/spool/mlmmj/domain.tld/listname structures are supported.
• Theming support.
• Localization support.
• Also creates introduction pages for the domain and each mailing list.

• MHonArc.
• rsync.
• Basic UNIX utilities: awk, cat, date, grep, install, sed and, of course, sh.

Tested on Debian Wheezy. Currently it requires GNU date so it is not very portable. Should fix this in a future update.

The current Makefile requires GNU make. In future versions it should work with BSD make too.

Running

make install

should install the script in /usr/local/bin, the configuration samples in /etc/mlmmj-archivist and the bundled templates in /usr/local/share/mlmmj-archivist/templates.

All paths can be adjusted by setting the environment variables:

• SYSCONFDIR: for the configuration directory.
• PREFIX: for replacing /usr/local with something else.
• BINDIR: the installation path for the executable script.
• SHAREDIR: the shared directory; currently contains the templates directory.
• DESTDIR: the root directory to work on. Useful for packaging.

After completing the installation you should copy the configuration files mlmmj-archivist.conf.sample to mlmmj-archivist.conf, and mhonarc.mrc.sample to mhonarc.mrc, and tweak to your preference, prior to running the script for first time.

mlmmj-archivist is designed to run from cron in predefined intervals. Since it creates archives incrementally it can be used with frequent intervals in busy hosts with many mailing list messages.

An example crontab entry for running mlmmj-archivist hourly:

5 * * * *  /usr/local/bin/mlmmj-archivist

• Add parallel archive creation capability, for SMP systems.
• Switch the localization system to something less hackish; gettext is a good candidate.

This project is licensed under the ISC license.