On Fri, 7 Jan 2000 00:49:20 -0800 (PST) Garth Corral garthc@abode.com wrote:

On Thu, 6 Jan 2000, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

My inclination would be to provide some indexing and search mechanism within the existing framework. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is that it fits well with my motivation for doing this in the first place.

I'll be a little more direct: I don't use MailMan's archiver and so have no direct interest in it. I use MHonArc externally it allows extremely fine grained control over how your archives appear and operate, and if you change your mind about something at later point, you can always regen them in the new look'n'feel (which I seem to do regularly).

That said, the question arises of what is the exact value of MailMan's archiver. It is minimal in feature set and almost totally unconfigurable. This doesn't make it useless, just of very narrow application.

If someone adds a search feature inside of MailMan/Pipermail, then MailMan remains having an internal archiver that is of minimal utility, just slightly less minimal than it was before. This is not a Bad Thing at all -- MailMan is improved and that is good.

If someone builds a method where the basic HTML that the archiver produces can be edited or at least customised, then all of a sudden we have a rather large thing as then we can customise look'n'feel, we can embead search tools, we can embed banners ads for commercial sites, we can exploit local application servers like PHP or Zope, and we can customise the entire archive experience and presentation to our heart's content. We can do all sorts of things that are not possible now and which extend MailMan in interesting directions _encluding_ adding (external) search capabilities to the archives. Also not a Bad Thing.

YMMV. Both are useful and valuable.

BTW Barry: Remember the guy a while back who did a bunch of CSS stuff for MailMan for look'n'feel configuration? What happened to that patch?

-- J C Lawrence Home: claw@kanga.nu ----------(*) Other: coder@kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--