[Mailman-Developers] Patch for Mail Archive mirroring

[Jeff Breidenbach]

Barry> In principle, I like more general solutions and hooks for
Barry> extensibility than hard-coding in external dependencies like
Barry> this.

Like this? Since the Mailman UI is a bunch of HTML forms, put the GUI
control for third party archiving on the internet.

                Configuration Categories

    * [General Options]            * Passwords
    * Language options             * Bounce processing
    * Membership Management...     * Local archiving
    * Non-digest options           * Third party archiving
    * Digest options               * Mail<->News gateways
                                                      

List admin clicks on [Third party archiving], which is special 
hyperlink [1] that goes to a mailman controlled dynamic webpage, 
perhaps on or redirected through list.org.


                  Third party archiving

   Archive the list publicly 
   on The Mail Archive?          [No] [Yes]

   Archive the list publicly 
   on MARC?                      [No] [Yes]

   Set as primary archive?       [None] [Mail-Archive] [MARC]


                 [Submit Your Changes]


When the user clicks on the submit button, the form POST goes back to
the mailman GUI and sets the appropriate functionality.  There are two
main advantages to this approach. First, it provides a global deadman
switch. Second, the feature gracefully degrades. The web page can
can say "not implemented yet" or "feature disabled". It can hold manual 
instructions, honest to god tightly integrated GUI controls, or a
combination of the above.

Of course now the Mailman is kind of on the hook for keeping something
up and running on the internet, which is kind of a pain. But as Lars
said, this is something that archival services can help with.

Cheers,
Jeff


[1] The hyperlink would be a little bit fancier than normal, and since
it would need to embed some information about the location of the
mailman installation. For example, if mailman was set up on foo.com,
then $FORM_POST_URL would be the form submission location on foo.com,
e.g.. http://foo.com/mailman/admin/list1/thirdpartyarchiving

       <a href=http://list.org/mailman17?arg=$FORM_POST_URL>
       Third Party Archiving</a>