[Mailman-Developers] Parsing and Rendering rfc8222

[John Dennis]

On Tue, 2006-07-04 at 15:44 -0400, emf wrote:
> 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.

It's not at all clear to me that mailman should be responsible for
archiving. Archiving and MLM (Mailing List Manager) functionality can be
orthogonal to each other. Archiving has a complex feature set if it's
done right, and it's complex to implement. There are many items on
Mailman's UI task list which need attention and can be done
independently of also trying to tackle the 800 pound gorilla known as
archiving.

If we do anything in the near term with archiving I suggest it be only
to clean up and further define an interface between Mailman as a MLM and
an independent mail archiver which would allow installations to install
the mail archiver of their choice along side of Mailman. I seem to
recall this is also Barry's preference who noted the existing pipermail
was only a stop-gap solution so there would be some default archiver,
but it was never the intention Mailman would have any extensive
archiving implementation.

For what its worth I went looking for best of breed in open source
archivers about 6 months ago and what I came up with was a project
called "Lurker" (http://lurker.sourceforge.net)

IMHO let the archiving experts deal with archiving, let the MLM experts
(e.g. Mailman) deal with managing mailing lists.

I recognize that Mailman would benefit from tighter integration with the
archiver such that it is possible to automatically include links in mail
which is being redistributed by the MLM, but rather than bringing any of
this functionality into Mailman lets define the interfaces which are
needed such that Mailman can operate cooperatively with any archiver
which supports a well defined API.

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>
Red Hat Inc.