[Mailman-Developers] GSoC

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 4:59 AM, Florian Fuchs <f at state-of-mind.de> wrote:
> Hi Ana,
>
> Am 26.03.12 19:03, schrieb Ana Cutillas:
>> Hi,
>>
>> my name is Ana Cutillas and I am a senior Computer Science student from
>> Spain. I am really interested in working on the Mailman project either with
>> you directly or with Systers.

Hey, welcome, Ana!  I suspect that the Systers organization has moved
on, since their specific needs were satisfied AFAIK.  But they have
some really good people (both as engineers and as human beings), so
please do get in touch with them (especially the people who worked on
their Mailman projects).  I'm sure they'll be glad to talk with you.

> This would definitely be a very interesting GSOC project! It might
> involve working on a couple of different ends of the mailman family,
> like the django web ui (launchpad.net/postorius), the archiver/searcher
> (see "hyperkitty" - Toshio Kuratomi probably has more details) and maybe
> even the Mailman3 core (see: launchpad.net/mailman).

To be honest, I don't see how it would be related to Postorius, except
perhaps as some sort of plug-in (but we don't have a plug-in
architecture for Postorius, yet).  Adding such features to Postorius
would be bloat, IMO.  I also worry about the performance hit; I think
it should probably maintain its own database, etc for the data-mining
end, and sparingly access the REST client API to update profiles.

> Yes, those would all be very interesting pieces of data.

To stalkers and Tom Clancy's favorite folks, as well as to nicer
people.  Make sure there are opt-outs for users.

> Of course! I think a good place to start would be to install mailman and
> postorius and have a look at the code.

Especially the Mailman client (http://launchpad.net/mailman.client).

> Also, Toshio could probably tell
> you a little bit more about the current work on the archiver.

Note that there is no *the* archiver yet.  Hyperkitty is the demo that
a few people have been working on, including Toshio at the sprints,
but there are others in play (eg, recent posts to this list).  Also,
Hyperkitty is currently based on somewhat limited technology (the
notmuch indexer).  I'm not sure it would be up to the demands of
data-mining.  Of course, if Toshio says it is, listen to him, not me.
:-)