[Mailman-Developers] external archiver

[Jonas Meurer]

hello,

I try to configure mailman to use lurker as archiver, but the usage of
External Archivers is not clear for me, and i didn't find any
documentation about this topic except of a hint in mailmans faq wizard,
which only describes the way of subscribing a archiving user to every
list and set the right alias to the archiver for the mta.

Since this requires procmail, which is quite steady at heavy load, i'dd
like to use the PUBLIC_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER and PRIVATE_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER
config options of mailman.

After searching some pages and files, i got from Defaults.py, that these
two options should be what I searched for.
I understood them as options where you set a shell command where the
message is passed to that should archive the message at the external
archiver.
If this is wrong, what's the intention of these two options?

For my external archiver (lurker), i have the binary lurker-index, which
needs the listname with option -l and expects the message at stdin.
so i set the two options like following:
PUBLIC_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER = '/usr/bin/lurker-index -l `echo %(listname)s \
		| tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"` -m'
PRIVATE_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER = '/usr/bin/lurker-index -l `echo %(listname)s \
		| tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"` -m'

this should do nothing else than running lurker-index with -l listname
(changed to lowercase letters, since lurker only support lowercase
listnames). so if the listname is either mylist or MyList, the command
should be:
/usr/bin/lurker-index -l `echo MyList | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"` -m
which ends normally ends up in:
/usr/bin/lurker-index -l mylist -m

but regardless if I use the above listed option, or directly
PUBLIC_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER = '/usr/bin/lurker-index -l mylist -m'
i get at /var/log/mailman/error:
Apr 09 02:21:15 2004 (18207) external archiver non-zero exit status: 1


any suggestions what I might have forgotten?

ah, i turned off multipart message filtering for not messing up lurker
at initial tests:
ARCHIVE_SCRUBBER = 0

sorry, i absolutely have no idea what I did wrong, and I CCed this
message to -developers since there seems to be no documented common
usage of the EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER options.
Maybe the message isn't passed to the shell command on stding because
other delivery method is expected, but i don't believe that.

Additional, what exactly does this ARCHIVE_TO_MBOX option do?
Defaults.py tells me:
# 1 - archive to mbox to use an external archiving mechanism only

does this mean that mailman archives to an mbox file and the external
archiver is intended to use this file for archiving new messages?

if yes, where can i find this mbox file? should the external archiver
option then use the file for updating archive rather than getting the
new message directly over standard input (stdin)?

sorry if i'm confusing, please tell me in this case, but i have too much
questions i'm not able to answer on my own, to get the whole big puzzle
put together out of all the little pieces.

bye
 jonas