John Dennis wrote: > It's not at all clear to me that mailman should be responsible for > archiving.
While I am somewhat in agreement, the current situation is that archiving comes bundled with mailman and represents a significant weakness in its current web UI. Not doing anything about the web UI presented by the archives would, in my mind, represent a substantial failing. > Archiving and MLM (Mailing List Manager) functionality can be > orthogonal to each other. I can imagine - but have never used - a mailing list where access to past emails is 'orthogonal' to the use of the mailing list. It is hard for me to see the orthogonality except inasmuch as there's often a different user agent involved. > Archiving has a complex feature set if it's > done right, and it's complex to implement. Well, happily mailman is in the situation where archiving is not done right, and it seems like there's room for doing enough to a.) represent an improvement on the current situation and b.) lay a decent groundwork for plugging in different archivers or offering more of this complexity you speak of. > There are many items on Mailman's UI task list which need attention and can > be done > independently of also trying to tackle the 800 pound gorilla known as > archiving. I am indeed taking this tack. However, even for things like the moderation approval page I need to parse & render emails. > I seem to > recall this is also Barry's preference who noted the existing pipermail > was only a stop-gap solution so there would be some default archiver, > but it was never the intention Mailman would have any extensive > archiving implementation. Like many stop gap solutions, this one is widely used, and represents the most visited portion of the "mailman web UI". At a bare minimum, the archive pages should provide decent navigation. The requirement for a default archiver remains, and the solution I propose is much more override friendly than the existing one; it wouldn't create hundreds of webpages out of the archives, just read out of the existing mbox files. > For what its worth I went looking for best of breed in open source > archivers about 6 months ago and what I came up with was a project > called "Lurker" (http://lurker.sourceforge.net) Thanks! I will look into this and see what I can glean from it. > IMHO let the archiving experts deal with archiving, let the MLM experts > (e.g. Mailman) deal with managing mailing lists. It is probably just a sign that I haven't explored the extant solutions sufficiently, but I have seen no sign that there are a variety of high-quality archiving solutions out there. What appears to me to be your main point - don't let archiving get in the way of delivering other UI functionality - is well taken; it is not at all at the top of my queue. ~ethan fremen -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list