[Mailman-Developers] Parsing and Rendering rfc8222

[emf]

Dearest mail manipulating macaques and perambulating python 
prestidigitators,

I have been blessed by the grace of Google and so am working full-time 
on improving Mailman's web UI:

http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Summer+of+Code

In order to provide interfaces to archives, I believe I must perform 
some intermediary manipulation; my goal is to get the information 
contained within the .mbox files mailman generates into ElementTrees and 
other objects so as to represent them via HTML/RSS/Atom/etc.

This is slightly out of scope for the web-UI project, as it is mostly 
about data model rather than actual user interface.

In the interest of not reinventing the wheel, I'm looking for existing 
python (or other!) code that does the things I need. I'm also putting 
out a call for anybody who likes this sort of thing to help me out (see 
below).

Here's where I'm at, grouped functionally:

* Need to convert rfc8222 to xml/html

I haven't found anything substantial via searching. My next step is to 
go spelunking in MailManager code and other python-webmail packages. If 
anyone knows good trees in this forest, please clue me in.

* Want to provide feeds (rss/atom/YourMommasSyntaxFormat)

Right this second I'm planning on using pyfeed [1]; is there anything 
else I should consider?

[1] http://home.blarg.net/~steveha/pyfeed.html

* mbox thread indexing on messages

I plan on using [2] to generate mbox thread indexes for rapid navigation 
of lists. Any suggestions for more robust variants would be welcome; 
feedback on how to handle threading for message-id-less messages would 
also be welcome.

[2] http://benno.id.au/code/archiver/jwzthreading.py

* full-text indexing

pylucene seems to be the obvious choice; anything else I should 
consider? Anyone know of good pylucene/web UI glue code out there?

(eg. something that leverages knowledge of the index to provide 
suggested keywords/tag cloud and/or tab-completion)

As to help, I am first and foremost interested in someone willing to 
write renderers as above and check it in to my branch.

I am also, however, interested in any advice, suggestions, 
dear-gods-whatever-you-do-don't-do-x comments, critiques of what is 
already checked in (zero python code, much html so far), pats on the 
back or other goodies (snailmail address available on request ;)

I do ask that you send anything not related to my above question 
directly to me, bypassing the list; I'd also humbly ask you to read the 
wiki page before telling me I should do XYZ; I may already be doing it.

I'm not actually subbed to python-list because I lack the stamina, so 
please cc: me on any follow ups.

Thank you for your generous assistance,

~ethan fremen