[Mailman-Developers] (no subject)

[Ken Manheimer]

Re the smart archives interest, one of the guys (newly) here has the
interest and may have the mandate to be doing something significant, of
course using zope rather than php/mysql or midgard.

(Newcomers to the mailman community may see some signs of preference for
python-based implementations of things in the mailman community - read,
python bigotry - and favoring of zope *could* be seen as another symptom
of that.  While favoring zope is really a lot more than just a python
preference, digital creations just recently announced a rather exciting
project, with partnership of SourceGear, for implementation of perl based
methods for zope, so people articulate and extend zope using perl.  Just
incidentally.-)

Smart archives for mailman (or for any mailling list collaboration)  has
been a dear wish of mine since i was working on mailman.  It was
heightened by joining digital creations, but i got distracted learning
zope and going in some other directions, and never got to the zope/mailman
integration.  Though i've gotten pretty far from mailman development, i'm
still extremely eager to see smart archives happen - i think the
collaborative usefulness of mailing lists is severely limited without a
comprehensive, well integrated smart archive.  I know barry and others
have been similarly psyched to see such a thing - i hope ethan's mandate
and interest does head in this direction, we'll see.  If se, there may be
some good opportunities for synergy with the other mailman developers
along the way...

Ken Manheimer
klm@digicool.com

On Thu, 25 May 2000 00:05:38 -0700, Nigel Metheringham
<Nigel.Metheringham@VData.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 24 May 2000 22:13:08 -0700 Chuq Von Rospach
> <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote: 
>
> [lots of stuff]
>
> > I used to use it, and then switched my web archives to a full
> > forum system (web crossing) and crosslinked everything. that has
> > its advantages and disadvantages.
> 
> One of my list members has been advocating WebCrossing.  What do you
> think of it?  It seemed excessively constraining to me, especially
> since I'm heading toward a massively WikiWiki-fied setup (every page
> can be commented on Wiki-style, all comments are free-standing Wiki
> entities etc etc etc).
> 
> >> -- Supports archive searching by MessageID.  I've an MTA hack
> >> that inserts a MessageID-based URL into all outgoing Mailman list
> >> traffic so the user can just hit the URL and be taken to that
> >> message in the archives (searches the MHonArc DB, useful for
> >> thread reference etc).
> 
> > Interesting hack. Very interesting hack. 
> 
> <bow>  Wish it were original to me.  One of my list members came up
> with the idea and then went and implemented it.  Its somewhere in
> Keystone under Tasks...
> 
> > you could do something really nice with PHP and MySQL, too, and do
> > away with MHonarc, and parse/templatize the text on the
> > fly. that's sort of where I'm headed down the road....
> 
> Yeah, I've thought about that but I really just don't see enough
> advantage to justify the time it would take to get something better
> than I have now.  Eric Hood (MHonArc author) has been also
> threatening to do something here for ages.
> 
> Its awfully tempting tho just on a "cool!" factor.

In response, on Thu, 25 May 2000 00:29:48 -0700, chuqui wrote:

> >One of my list members has been advocating WebCrossing.  What do you
> >think of it?
> 
> Not appropriate for this list. Let's talk offline. I'm designing it 
> out of my systems in favor of other things, but the reasons are 
> complex -- and I've recommended it INTO at least one major 
> development project at the same time. So I guess the answer is "it 
> depends, but I'm not going to be using it myself..."
> 
> >  > you could do something really nice with PHP and MySQL, too, and
> 
> 
> >Yeah, I've thought about that but I really just don't see enough
> >advantage to justify the time it would take to get something better
> >than I have now.
> 
> I wonder how much of this could be driven out of something like 
> Midgard? But loading your entire archives into a database gives you 
> the ability to do all sorts of interesting linking and searching and 
> stuff, and "all" you'd need is some email->XML converter, and then...
> 
> Oh, man. We need to at least pretend to be on topic for this list, 
> but I need a white board and a pen... (scribbly scribble...)