Re: [Mailman-Developers] Patch for Mail Archive mirroring
Barry wrote:
I think I've stated my general philosophy in a previous message. If WizzyMTA came with a new plug-in, documentation, and some promise of support help (if only to answer questions on mailman-users), we'd probably add the module in the next release. If we had a similar plug-in architecture for multiple 3rd-party archivers, we'd facilitate the same kind of thing for that service. I'd be all for that.
Thanks for your feedback. I'll be happy to dig into the current archive system and work on a plug-in architecture to support multiple external archivers. I originally thought the Archive component of Mailman was something intended only to support the local pipermail archive, but using that API like you mention sounds like it would work well. I'm guessing it'd be a fair amount of work to make the internal pipermail work with the plug-in approach just like the external archivers. At the very least, it would need a lot of testing to make sure it doesn't break existing installations.
I'll get back with MARC and possibly GMane so I can try to make things as general as is reasonable. I'll try to run a proposed approach in front of the list before coding it (unless it's easy enough to demonstrate the proposal via code).
I think the only concern is that I think admins *would* find value in per-list control of external archives. This is speculation, though.
Jeff
On May 12, 2005, at 5:43 PM, Jeff Marshall wrote:
Barry wrote:
I think I've stated my general philosophy in a previous message. If WizzyMTA came with a new plug-in, documentation, and some promise of support help (if only to answer questions on mailman-users), we'd probably add the module in the next release. If we had a similar
plug-in architecture for multiple 3rd-party archivers, we'd facilitate the
same kind of thing for that service. I'd be all for that.Thanks for your feedback. I'll be happy to dig into the current
archive system and work on a plug-in architecture to support
multiple external archivers. I originally thought the Archive
component of Mailman was something intended only to support the
local pipermail archive, but using that API like you mention sounds
like it would work well. I'm guessing it'd be a fair amount of
work to make the internal pipermail work with the plug-in approach
just like the external archivers. At the very least, it would need
a lot of testing to make sure it doesn't break existing installations.I'll get back with MARC and possibly GMane so I can try to make
things as general as is reasonable. I'll try to run a proposed
approach in front of the list before coding it (unless it's easy
enough to demonstrate the proposal via code).I think the only concern is that I think admins *would* find value
in per-list control of external archives. This is speculation,
though.
As a webhosting company we would without a doubt find a lot of value
in any per-list control. We already get quite a lot of requests for
this or that customization that's not possible on a per list basis now.
This particular feature would be great as many of our users are not
happy with pipermail and it'd be nice to point them to a way to
easily enable some other archiving solution. Right now, I just
vaguely tell them how they might go about doing it themselves.
Likewise, if we add support for some other archiver ourselves it'd be
nice to not have to turn it on for all of the lists on the Mailman
install at the same time. Moving lists between differently
configured Mailman installs is an option, but this would be less work
if it worked well.
This has been an interesting discussion overall...
Dallas
On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 20:43, Jeff Marshall wrote:
I'll get back with MARC and possibly GMane so I can try to make things as general as is reasonable. I'll try to run a proposed approach in front of the list before coding it (unless it's easy enough to demonstrate the proposal via code).
Cool.
I think the only concern is that I think admins *would* find value in per-list control of external archives. This is speculation, though.
We can always take the simple approach first and see if people get motivated to request more. The nice thing about a site-wide only selection is that you don't have to expose any of this to the web u/i.
-Barry
"BAW" == Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> writes:
BAW> The nice thing about a site-wide only selection is that you
BAW> don't have to expose any of this to the web u/i.Uh, is that so "nice"? While I'm sure nobody has up to the minute stats lying around<wink>, my sense is that a lot of the traffic on mailman-users is from people using webhosting services. Cf Dallas's post for a webhoster's take. Dunno if you want to do anything nice for Cpanel, but wouldn't any features that reduced those FAQs would be worth considering?
Note, I have no sense of what maintenance and support issues go with exposing formerly site-wide configs to listowners, so I can't take that into consideration---please forgive if this is a no-brainer.
-- School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.
Barry> In principle, I like more general solutions and hooks for Barry> extensibility than hard-coding in external dependencies like Barry> this.
Like this? Since the Mailman UI is a bunch of HTML forms, put the GUI control for third party archiving on the internet.
Configuration Categories
* [General Options] * Passwords
* Language options * Bounce processing
* Membership Management... * Local archiving
* Non-digest options * Third party archiving
* Digest options * Mail<->News gateways
List admin clicks on [Third party archiving], which is special hyperlink [1] that goes to a mailman controlled dynamic webpage, perhaps on or redirected through list.org.
Third party archivingArchive the list publicly on The Mail Archive? [No] [Yes]
Archive the list publicly on MARC? [No] [Yes]
Set as primary archive? [None] [Mail-Archive] [MARC]
[Submit Your Changes]When the user clicks on the submit button, the form POST goes back to the mailman GUI and sets the appropriate functionality. There are two main advantages to this approach. First, it provides a global deadman switch. Second, the feature gracefully degrades. The web page can can say "not implemented yet" or "feature disabled". It can hold manual instructions, honest to god tightly integrated GUI controls, or a combination of the above.
Of course now the Mailman is kind of on the hook for keeping something up and running on the internet, which is kind of a pain. But as Lars said, this is something that archival services can help with.
Cheers, Jeff
[1] The hyperlink would be a little bit fancier than normal, and since it would need to embed some information about the location of the mailman installation. For example, if mailman was set up on foo.com, then $FORM_POST_URL would be the form submission location on foo.com, e.g.. http://foo.com/mailman/admin/list1/thirdpartyarchiving
<a href=http://list.org/mailman17?arg=$FORM_POST_URL>
Third Party Archiving</a>Dallas> As a webhosting company we would without a doubt find a lot of Dallas> value in any per-list control. We already get quite a lot of Dallas> requests for this or that customization that's not possible on Dallas> a per list basis now. This particular feature would be great Dallas> as many of our users are not happy with pipermail and it'd be Dallas> nice to point them to a way to easily enable some other Dallas> archiving solution.
Dallas, would you consider applying the existing Sourceforge patch to your mailman installation? It is helpful to get feedback from real live users.
John> And change the naming. "Outside"? I can hear it now: John> "I ain't archiv'n my list with a bunch of furriners". :-)
How about "third party archiving" ?
Brad> Unless, that is, you gateway to USENET news, in which case Google and Brad> others have news archives that you could not control and could Brad> not even be aware of in most cases.
Google Groups honors "X-No-Archive: Yes"
http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/posting_faq.html#prevent
At 2:52 PM -0700 2005-05-14, Jeff Breidenbach wrote:
Google Groups honors "X-No-Archive: Yes"
Yes, but there are plenty of other gatewaying systems out there which may not. My point is that once the message leaves your control, there's not much you can do about what people do with it.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
participants (6)
-
Barry Warsaw -
Brad Knowles -
Dallas Bethune -
Jeff Breidenbach -
Jeff Marshall -
Stephen J. Turnbull