[Mailman-Developers] Re: Future of pipermail?

[Bill Bumgarner]

WebDAV works really, really well as an archiver.   And it would be  
particularly cool if the archive already had the MIME pieces exploded out.   
Even cooler would be if the messages sent to the list were rewritten such that  
all of the MIME pieces-- typically large, on some lists-- were actually URLs to  
the archived pieces on teh WebDAV server.

If it had an interface that sent an HTTP message to some random  
webserver/appserver/cgi-bin letting it know a new message was submitted so that  
server could decide an appropriate time to rebuild an index file, that would  
allow the presentation of the archive to be offloaded from Mailman.

Since WebDAV will be included with every copy of Apache 2.0 by default, there  
really isn't that much additional "moving pieces" load on the configuration.    
Mailman already requires diddling the web server configuration-- copy/paste a  
few more lines isn't that big of a deal.

Anyone want to take this on?

Oh, wait a minute, that's right... it has already been done!

ftp://ftp.codefab.com/pub/unsupported/mailman_20000821_1123.tar.gz

It is based on a version of Mailman from sometime around May or so... so, it  
needs to be updated to the latest version from the repository.  However, it  
DOES work and has been used in production systems [who will remain nameless to  
protect this community from me venting] for quite some time.  The company that  
hired me to build this actually paid a bunch of $$$ for it to be built-- as  
such, I actually had the freedom to thiink about doing it right and not just  
hacking it on as fast as possible.

I don't know if I did do it right, but Barry provided quite a bit of guidance  
and I don't think it is a totally offensive set of changes...

b.bum