[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 17:46, PieterB wrote:

> It's a similar university project of the Eindhoven University of
> Technology.  The project has just been finished and I assume all
> sources are/will be available. I saw the author upload the code to
> sf.net, and probably our host gewis.nl will host a demo environment
> in a couple of weeks.

Cool!

> About coupling the archiver/mailinglist:
> 
> > So I don't want to have to ask the archiver for that url.  I want
> > Mailman to be able to calculate it from something unique in the message,
> > and have the archiver agree on the algorithm, so that it (or some other
> > translation layer) can do the mapping back to the archived article.  Or,
> > Mailman should be able to calculate a unique id for the article and
> > stuff that in a header for the archiver to index on.
> 
> Zwiki has implemented such functionality based on the time that the
> message is received/sent. E.g. a mailout for a webpost at the
> http://zwiki.org/GeneralDiscussion looks like this in the e-mail:
> (look at the generated signature, with a hyperlink to the message
> anchor)
> 
> > There is a discussion on the mailman-developers list on the
> > requirements of an archiver: See:
> > http://news.gmane.org/gmane.mail.mailman.devel or my post at:
> > http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.mailman.devel/14954
> > --
> > forwarded from http://zwiki.org/GeneralDiscussion#msg20031027142214-0800@zwiki.org
> 
> Off course, in this case the msgid, doesn't have to be shared between
> the archiver and mailinglist, because zwiki does both in one
> application.

That's not bad (probably better than the sha hexdigest I'm usually so
fond of :), but yep we need to agree on a way to pass that information
to the archiver.  Mailman does add a unique header specifying the time
of arrival, but I suggest a special X- header that Mailman can insert
and the archiver can read.  

Anybody know of any prior art here?

-Barry