Re the smart archives interest, one of the guys (newly) here has the interest and may have the mandate to be doing something significant, of course using zope rather than php/mysql or midgard.

(Newcomers to the mailman community may see some signs of preference for python-based implementations of things in the mailman community - read, python bigotry - and favoring of zope *could* be seen as another symptom of that. While favoring zope is really a lot more than just a python preference, digital creations just recently announced a rather exciting project, with partnership of SourceGear, for implementation of perl based methods for zope, so people articulate and extend zope using perl. Just incidentally.-)

Smart archives for mailman (or for any mailling list collaboration) has been a dear wish of mine since i was working on mailman. It was heightened by joining digital creations, but i got distracted learning zope and going in some other directions, and never got to the zope/mailman integration. Though i've gotten pretty far from mailman development, i'm still extremely eager to see smart archives happen - i think the collaborative usefulness of mailing lists is severely limited without a comprehensive, well integrated smart archive. I know barry and others have been similarly psyched to see such a thing - i hope ethan's mandate and interest does head in this direction, we'll see. If se, there may be some good opportunities for synergy with the other mailman developers along the way...

Ken Manheimer klm@digicool.com

On Thu, 25 May 2000 00:05:38 -0700, Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham@VData.co.uk> wrote:

On Wed, 24 May 2000 22:13:08 -0700 Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:

[lots of stuff]

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I used to use it, and then switched my web archives to a full forum system (web crossing) and crosslinked everything. that has its advantages and disadvantages.

One of my list members has been advocating WebCrossing. What do you think of it? It seemed excessively constraining to me, especially since I'm heading toward a massively WikiWiki-fied setup (every page can be commented on Wiki-style, all comments are free-standing Wiki entities etc etc etc).

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-- Supports archive searching by MessageID. I've an MTA hack that inserts a MessageID-based URL into all outgoing Mailman list traffic so the user can just hit the URL and be taken to that message in the archives (searches the MHonArc DB, useful for thread reference etc).

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Interesting hack. Very interesting hack.

<bow> Wish it were original to me. One of my list members came up with the idea and then went and implemented it. Its somewhere in Keystone under Tasks...

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you could do something really nice with PHP and MySQL, too, and do away with MHonarc, and parse/templatize the text on the fly. that's sort of where I'm headed down the road....

Yeah, I've thought about that but I really just don't see enough advantage to justify the time it would take to get something better than I have now. Eric Hood (MHonArc author) has been also threatening to do something here for ages.

Its awfully tempting tho just on a "cool!" factor.

In response, on Thu, 25 May 2000 00:29:48 -0700, chuqui wrote:

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One of my list members has been advocating WebCrossing. What do you think of it?

Not appropriate for this list. Let's talk offline. I'm designing it out of my systems in favor of other things, but the reasons are complex -- and I've recommended it INTO at least one major development project at the same time. So I guess the answer is "it depends, but I'm not going to be using it myself..."

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you could do something really nice with PHP and MySQL, too, and

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Yeah, I've thought about that but I really just don't see enough advantage to justify the time it would take to get something better than I have now.

I wonder how much of this could be driven out of something like Midgard? But loading your entire archives into a database gives you the ability to do all sorts of interesting linking and searching and stuff, and "all" you'd need is some email->XML converter, and then...

Oh, man. We need to at least pretend to be on topic for this list, but I need a white board and a pen... (scribbly scribble...)