On Jul 05, 2012, at 09:24 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
IMO, make that *three* things. It ought to be possible to fire up the NNTP runner on an existing archive, and vend messages.
+1
I suppose this means a separate database for news properties like the message to message number mapping, and perhaps for newsgroup names.
Newsgroup names are an issue here. It seems to me that (if not gateway'd to Usenet) they should be something like (pseudo-code)
"mailman." + join(reverse(split(list-id,".")),".")
Eg, this list would be "mailman.org.python.mailman-developers". I know that's considered ugly-out-the-wazoo, but these need to be UUIDs (consider mirrors), and mailman@python.org should not be in the same subtree as mailman@python.net (ie,
mailman.net.python.mailman vs mailman.org.python.mailman
not
mailman.python.net.mailman vs mailman.python.org.mailman
The top-level maybe shouldn't be "mailman", but rather something like "list-archive".
Why is the prefix needed at all, especially since you qualified this as "not gatewayed to Usenet"? If all the messages are local to the server, there should be no collisions on reverse list-id newsgroup names. I've always kind of felt that Gmane's 'gmane.' prefix was a bit superfluous. I'm sure there's a good reason for it (probably buried in some Gmane FAQ).
+1 for the reversed list-ids.
Another issue with newsgroup names is that some lists *are* registered in the news hierarchy, so provision for such aliases should be allowed.
Maybe that's the reason for the prefix?
Let the bikeshed-painting begin!
blue, no yellow! aaarrrggg!
-Barry