[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Jeff Breidenbach]

> Regardless of whether we *need* to generate our own unique ID, I'm
> leaning towards the thought that we're going to *want* to generate
> our own for usability reasons.  In a perfect world, i think we'd have
> a sequence number so I could visit http://example.com/mailman/
> archives/listname/204.html and know that 205.html would be the next
> message to that list, but any short unique id would do if sequence
> numbers are too much of a pain.

I agree there's a lot of usability benefits from short URLs, but perhaps
this is the job of the archive server, and not the list server. Mharc (an
archive server) is a great example here. Mharc's canonical message
format is pretty human friendly.

http://ww.mhonarc.org/archive/html/mharc-users/2002-08/msg00000.html

Unfortunately, there's no trivial way for the list server to know that human
friendly URL when the message is sent out. Fortunately, Mharc is also
happy handles messages by message-id, which the list server does know
about.

http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=mharc-users&i=200208010532.g715W0e31774@gator.earlhood.com

Had I been the implementer, I'd probably have made mharc do an HTTP 302
redirect from the longer URL to the shorter URL. But that's besides the point.
The point is we have an existing, working, happy archival server, and it would
be really nice if list servers (such as mailman) were compatible. And by
compatible, I mean offering the capability of embedding an archival URL in the
footers of messages.

-Jeff