[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Iain Bapty]

PieterB wrote:

>I think they are all quite basic. I think personally 10 and 12 are
>'should-haves' in my opinion.
>  
>
I may have underestimated the time it will take me to implement them, 
but I am quite inexperienced in projects of this nature. The closest I 
have done is some ASP.NET and VB.NET front ends to MS SQL databases as 
part of my summer job. If I get to the stage where I can implement more 
than those requirements and I have the time, then I may.

>Also have a look at the "SMART Archiver" project,
>http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartarchiver/
>
>	A replacement for the standard GNU Mailman archiver that
>	supports attachments, searching, date selection, message
>	editing and more, requires a database such as postgressql
>	(mysql support is coming in a future version)
>  
>
I will evaluate this as part of my candidate re-use components analysis 
in my report. I was hoping that I would be the first to actually put 
together a new archiver for Mailman, oh well.

>Other requirements you might consider:
>
>- db support for Zope, http://zope.org
>  
>
I may do this depending on my design decisions.

>- Unix mbox output (based on the db). That would make it easy to
>upgrade, or to change to a different archiver.
>  
>
If achieve my non-functional requirements this should be fairly 
straightford to implement.

>- support for a 'view complete thread' (this would really be nice!)
>  
>
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this. The type of interface I 
am aiming for can be seen in Ka-Ping Yee's Zest prototype at 
http://www.zesty.ca/zest

>- python based, because that would make it fit better with mailman
>and will make it easier to install
>  
>
Definately.

>- easy to use api for adding new messages (e.g. use it as an archiver
>for wiki discussions, such as http://zwiki.org/GeneralDiscussion )
>  
>
 From what Barry Warsaw has told me, Mailman supports external archivers 
that provide a command-line client. Not exactly an API, but if I choose 
to use this then it would be fairly straightforward to adapt the 
archiver for other uses.

Thanks a lot for your feedback and the SMART Archiver link.

Iain