[Mailman-Developers] Archiver

[PieterB]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 09:06:34AM +0000, Iain Bapty wrote:
> As you will probably know by my few posts. I had been intending on 
> producing an archiver for my project. Unfortunately, yesterday I learned 
> about a project (SMART Archiver) that pretty much does everything I was 
> intending to do, which makes me pretty redundant.
Sorry, to shatter your plans. I wouldn't call you or a new archiver
project redundant. I think it was very good of you to ask the community
for input on your ideas.

> I'm quite desperate, Barry suggested that I ask here if anyone can 
> suggest any other work I could do for my project?
> 
> My project has to be a substantial piece of individual work that 
> actually produces some kind of software artifact. It should be produced 
> independently, I shouldn't be reliant on anyone else in order to 
> complete the project. It also has to be challenging, in order to get 
> good marks I have to solve problems, it cannot just be something like 
> bug fixing an existing program. I am meant to spend 200 hours on my 
> project, including report writing and presentation writing.
Well, I think you underestimated the work of creating an archiver
you described (especially if you would have implemented every wish
of the mailman community ;). I don't know how long the SmartArchiver
people worked on the project, but I think it was done with more
people and more time. 

Things you might consider:
- Extension to SmartArchiver/mailman2/mailman3. I think it should
be possible to define a project which you can do on your own, and
contribute to other projects. E.g. creating a good persistance layer
for an archiver, for example using Ape:
http://hathaway.freezope.org/Software/Ape

- making a good spam handling mechanism for mailman (including the
ability to approve messages through the web, be able to monitor the
spam, etc) and being able to report spam-messages to Pyzor/Razor/DCC.
There are a lot of parts available, but I think good integration
of those parts is lacking at this moment. I really think you could
solve a problem for quite some people with this. See
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.mailman.devel/14910/ for my
ideas.

- ask the same question on the zope-dev or zope3-dev mailinglist.
There aren't a lot applications for Zope3, and there may be great
ideas for such small projects.

> Thanks for any advice.
Your welcome,
Good luck,

Pieter

-- 
http://zwiki.org/PieterB