I'm writing to find out the state of and philosophy surrounding pipermail in mailman, to see if there is a productive way to provide some code/development-time to that part of mailman.
I know there are several decent third-party archivers out there, but many of the mailing list archives I browse regularly are using pipermail because it's the mailman default.... one less thing to install, administer, and upgrade. Unfortunately, pipermail doesn't do a good job formatting messages for html.. (messages with no line-breaks are the most annoying problem I regularly run into)
I've written code for this a number of times (eGroups, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups). I also released an open-source python/clearsilver/sqlite based archiver with redundant text-eliding, a few different thread views, and search... ( http://www.clearsilver.net/archive/ ) which is hardly used both because I don't try to popularize it, and because many sites just leave the default (pipermail).
If there is some code (and time) I can contribute to mailman/pipermail, I'd like to do so. I'm writing this message to "take a temperature" and find out what, if any, contributions would be appreciated the mailman development team. I could imagine answers like:
a) pipermail is fine... if you want to fix a bug or two submit a patch, but we don't want to improve it b) we're ditching pipermail entirely... in the future sites will have to choose an install an external archiver c) we'd love pipermail to be improved... but we still want it to be simple, static-html, and dependency free d) we'd love a dynamic-ui replacement for pipermail... as long as it uses the same cgi/templating model as mailman ui
Thoughts? Is there any help I can offer up here?