[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Barry Warsaw]

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 13:45, Brad Knowles wrote:

> 	That said, storing meta-data in a real database and then using 
> external filesystem techniques for actually accessing the data, 
> should give you the best of both worlds -- the speed of access of the 
> database, and the reliability and well-understood access and backup 
> mechanisms of filesystems.

I'm strongly in favor of this kind of approach.  I don't know what the
best on-disk storage format is (although cycbuf sounds interesting), but
I'm pretty sure we want the raw messages stored as plain files on the
file system.  

We may even want both the encoded and decoded messages stored on the
file system -- at the very least, we should have attachments decoded and
stored in separate files.  Then we want metadata about the messages
stored in a database.  We should be able to regenerate or update the
metadata by trolling over the raw message storage, and we should be able
to vend messages from the message store via any number of protocols.

The message store should be a central component of Mailman, but it
should be defined by an interface in case we decide to change the
implementation of the message store.

-Barry