[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Gustav H Meyer]

Hi,

I think this is the first time that I'm posting here but hopefully
not the last. Thanks to everyone involved for an incredible project.
I'm not much of a developer but I like practical solutions and will
do everything possible to help improve in this area even if it's
just to give some feedback.

I'm very excited about this project and can't wait for the next
version to come out with full integration between web forum and
mailing list. I like this idea very much and it seems that we're
going to see it real soon. :)

On 24/07/2007 18:43, Dale Newfield wrote:
> Jeff Breidenbach wrote:
>> In addition, Barry was talking about concocting a unique
>> identifier from the Date field and Message-ID. I'm not a big fan of
>> this idea, because the date field comes from the mail user agent
>> and is often wildly corrupt; e;g; coming from 100 years in the future.
> 
> Oh--I was assuming the Date to which he was referring was the current 
> timestamp at which mailman was processing the message.  I was going to 
> say that this guarantees uniqueness, but I guess there are parallel 
> mailman implementations where more than one machine/processor are all 
> serving the same list, and then two different machines/processors might 
> wind up with identical timestamps while processing two different messages.

I also like the idea of seeing the date somewhere in the URL but
IMHO we also need to see a unique sequential number. How about the
following idea:

http://my.list.server/archivebase/mylist/200707240001/msg00001/
http://my.list.server/archivebase/mylist/200707250001/msg00002/
http://my.list.server/archivebase/mylist/200707250002/msg00003/

and at the same time allow the following:
http://my.list.server/archivebase/mylist/msg00001/
http://my.list.server/archivebase/mylist/msg00002/
http://my.list.server/archivebase/mylist/msg00003/

This way you can see exactly how many messages were sent on a day
and how many messages have been sent since the start.

BTW the sequential number does in my view not have to be a decimal
value. Anything short and sweet will do as long as you can work it
out and at the same time allow for almost unlimited growth.

Just an idea.

Regards,
Gustav H Meyer