31 May 2006 pesco   » (Journeyer)

Posting to Advogato via email

If this messages reaches my Advo diary, my new mail-to-advo gateway program is not only working but also correctly embedded into my mail setup via procmail. Thus, albeit being undocumented, underfeatured, and unpolished, the program is quite functional. Lest I forget it myself, here are the quick set-up instructions:

Step 1: Dependencies.

The program is written in Haskell and has been tested with GHC 6.4.1. It requires a number of Haskell packages, namely: MissingH (0.13.1), HaXml (1.13), NewBinary (2005-05-30), Crypto (3.0.3), HaXml (1.13), http (2005-04-23), haxr (2006-05-30, custom-patched)

I've already submitted my patches for haxr (the XML-RPC library) to its author, Björn Bringert. Hopefully, he'll accept them soon. In short, the particular problem was that Advogato returns <value> elements with whitespace (i.e. character data) around the actual data element. I had to modify a function called fromXRValue to filter them out -- /unless/ the whole <value> consists of /only/ character data, which is supposed to be interpreted equivalently to a <string> data element. Duh. (Rant: This format is supposed to be processed by /machines/ for fsck's sake!)

Step 2: Fetch and build.

There's just a single source file, http://www.khjk.org/~sm/code/advopost/advopost.lhs. Fetch it and build with the straight-forward command 'ghc -o advopost --make advopost.lhs'. Make sure you've got all the above dependencies visible (I had to manually 'ghc-pkg expose' HaXml, I think).

Step 3: Procmailrc.

Choose an email account to direct your postings to. I'm posting to a mailing list and the posts loop back to my own account. There, the following procmail recipe passes any posts from me to that list through advopost:

:0 c
* ^TO_the@mailing.list
* ^From:.*my@email.addr
* ! ^In-Reply-To:
| /path/to/advopost my-advo-name my-advo-pass

Put this recipe at the beginning of your respective .procmailrc; the 'c' flag in the first line means "copy", i.e. a copy of the mail is passed to advopost and the original continues through the rest of .procmailrc. The third condition line makes this rule apply only to messages that don't carry an "In-Reply-To" header, i.e. only fresh posts are passed to Advogato, not my replies to other people's messages.

Enjoy.

PS. Er, naturally, advopost is open-source software. You may peruse the published version under the terms of the common 3-clause BSD license.

PPS. I know, this post is missing lots of markup. While advopost would pass it all through untouched, I don't want to burden the mailing list I'm cross-posting to with lots of HTML tags. My plan is to finally interpret the input to advopost as Markdown, cf. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/.

Update. Aha, of course, non-ASCII characters come through wrong. I'm pretty sure I'm transmitting them as UTF-8, or at least so I had assumed. Will have to investigate...

Update 2. Yay, Björn has already accepted my patches! Advopost will now work with the latest haxr from darcs (2006-05-31).

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