On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 15:12, Barry Warsaw wrote:
On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 15:06, Kevin McCann wrote:
To me, this is the single most important part. How do you intend to store the messages?
Maybe others don't give a fig but I think that if archived messages were to be stored in an easy-to-access database then life would be good.
I agree, although I don't know if I'd store everything in MySQL.
I'd love to have these database fields in a messages table at my disposal:
id (unique to system, not message-id) listname subject date from body message-id references mime_headers
This would make it very easy to build useful and flexible web apps. The need is there. I can smell it. ;-) Bottom line, the easier you make access to all of the little bits of a message that are important in one way or another, the more widespread development will be. And the faster we'll see really, really cool mailing list-focused web apps that foster communication, collaboration and community building, all for the betterment of mankind.
:-)
- Kevin
There are a couple of ways I could see slicing things. You could store one message per file a la MH, with some elaboration to avoid inode exhaustion. Or you could store everything in an mbox file with a file offset index. Or perhaps store everything to an nntp server (Twisted would make a nice platform for this <wink>).
What would then be in the database would be records providing easy lookup by message-id (at least) into the on-disk message store.
Also, I really want the next generation archiver to do everything through cgi (or equivalent programmatic interface). The ability to massage the messages on the way out to me outweighs the benefits of vending messages directly from the file system.
-Barry