[Mailman-Developers] Moderation comment interface change

J C Lawrence claw@under.engr.sgi.com
Mon, 08 Feb 1999 15:38:19 -0800


On Mon, 8 Feb 1999 14:41:55 -0500 
Christopher G Petrilli<petrilli@amber.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 08, 1999 at 11:24:18AM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:

>>> Well, the other option is PMDF style (4 0x001 characters at the
>>> beginning of the line).
>> 
>> True, tho its been quite a while since I've run into that one.

> Oh you'd be amazed how often I run into it... MMDF/PMDF live :-)

I'll make no comment on elisp based MUA's.

> Actually, it's not a bad format, probably better than all the
> others, and well "documented" in elisp.

True, and that'a a major strength.

>>> THe big problem with using MH-style is that it can become a
>>> HUGE HUGE HUGE disk hog...
>> 
>> I have a little over a million and a half messages in MH folders
>> right now, and yes, they chew disk space.  Disk however is cheap.

> Cheap yes, but still, I don't know that I want to waste it like
> this unless there's no other solution.

This is why you have options, such as the _option_ to save MH
folders.

>> Need a MHonArc analogue that will run against MySQL.

> You mean a user interface? :-) Of course...

There are multiple possible definitions of UI in that sentence.
I see two main approaches:

  A patch to MHonArc to read from MySQL

  A MHonArc analogue that will dynamically generate pages at request 
time from a MySQL database.

The first is the easiest and has all the prior art behind it.  The
second is the nominally "better" approach but is a significant
engineering efffort.

>> Need a decent search tool (I use WebGlimpse, but HT://Dig isn't
>> too bad) that will run against the results.

> THis is the second problem... I've been thinking about it... I
> don't know of any text-indexer (ie inverted indeces) that is
> designed to be programatically driven, rather than
> stand-alone... 

Agreed.

> I want something that can do all it's indexing, but be driven from
> the unified interface, not from some secondary interface... know
> what I mean?

Yup.  Need something that will index the DB contents and derive
appropriate URLs for the data found, rather than running thru the
presentation_interface/web server to access the data and bind them
to URLs.

Its a genericy vs effort issue.  Good search tools are not trivial.

-- 
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw@kanga.nu
(Contractor)                             Internet: coder@kanga.nu
---------(*)                    Internet: claw@under.engr.sgi.com
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...