Hi,
reaching the end of google summer of code, here is my final report. I have pushed all code to my bzr repository and have a running demo of the NNTP archive under mailman3.animux.de port 119 and 563. (The postorius web interface under mailman3.animux.de is not working completly correctly since I merged the mailman trunk back into my code)
Features that are working:
NNTP Daemon could be started via the runner interface. It could be listen on two ports. The first one is a plain tcp connection supporting STARTTLS and the second allows nntps connections. (Please notice, that thunderbird currently does only support nntps connections and does not ask if it should accept the certificate. To test the nntps connections you first have to add the CACert root certificate to the list of trusted certificate authorities.)
The nntp daemon supports all mandatory commands and most of the commands of the READER capability. Additional to that it supports the AUTHINFO extension. The nntp daemon authenticates the user against the user information stored by mailman core. Because it has only access to the crypt passwords, it could only support authentiaction mechanism that uses plain text passwords. Therefor it supports and requires the STARTTLS extension (or the plain SSL connection) for authentication.
The nntp daemon provides access to all public list archives without authentication. If a user is logged in, the user has also access to its subscribed mailing lists, that has private archives. Currently the nntp archive uses a slightly patched version of kittystore (to allow access to mails based on its id in the mailing list). There is also a module that fills the kittystore if sending a mail via the lists. I currently imported some messages from an mbox into bla@mailman3.animux.de and feed some real messages into test@mailman3.animux.de.
Although gsoc is over now, I would like to continue to work for mailman3. Next steps for the NNTP archive and archives in general could be:
Currently the nntp archive uses a slightly patches version of kittystore (allowing to access mails based on their database id). The IArchiver implementation uses the SqlAlchemy interface to feed data into the store. It would be much nicer not require a second ORM mapper. On solution could be to convert the SqlAlchemy interface to Storm models. But I think, before that the whole message store infrastructure should be reconsidered. Currently it works but their might be the same problems like with the user information mentioned earlier on this mailing list. kittystore currently stores a superset of all properties all archives need. Maybe here (in contrast to the user information) it would be a good idea to split it into private information of the archives and simply commonly stored mails. (I wrote some thoughts about that on my blog[1].)
Because of the current architecture of the kittystore the NNTP archive could not search for message ids over all known mailing lists. This is a feature of the commands ARTICLE, BODY, HEAD and STAT. I do not know if there are many news clients out there supporting it, but it should be supported in any way.
The NNTP protocols requires multiline responses to several commands. Currently the responses are build as a list and then send as whole to the client. For some commands it would be better to use a generator and to steam the line as they are generated. Even now (with only a few test lists) I noticed that the querying of the database about the count of the articles in the different lists slow down the LIST command. Streaming the lines it would be much convenient for the user.
(optional) Currently it is not possible to POST articles to a mailing list via the NNTP archive. It was stated that most of the news clients could send a mail as answer. Currently that is okay, but I think that it would be not so hard to implement it later as addition.
For reference: the current code is available at launchpad[2]. I am open for improvements and as I said, although gsoc is over now, I would like to continue to work with mailman. (even though I do not like bazaar as much as git)
Thanks, Alex
1: http://blog.animux.de/message-stores-and-mailman-archivers.html 2: https://code.launchpad.net/~alexander-sd4c/mailman/mailman