[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 15:12:29 -0500 
Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 15:06, Kevin McCann wrote:

> There are a couple of ways I could see slicing things.  You could
> store one message per file a la MH, with some elaboration to avoid
> inode exhaustion.  Or you could store everything in an mbox file with
> a file offset index.  Or perhaps store everything to an nntp server
> (Twisted would make a nice platform for this <wink>).

It would take little to bolt the NNTP supports from Twisted into Mailman
and then grab something like MeoWWW for the archive presentation.  Its
quite useful as-is.

> What would then be in the database would be records providing easy
> lookup by message-id (at least) into the on-disk message store.

Bingo, plus the option of opening the NNTP interface to external users
as another list reading/posting method.  Now Mailman can become an
all-in-one lightweight archiving news and mailing list system for
precious little expense.

> Also, I really want the next generation archiver to do everything
> through cgi (or equivalent programmatic interface).  The ability to
> massage the messages on the way out to me outweighs the benefits of
> vending messages directly from the file system.

Agreed.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.