[Mailman-Users] Search Archive Feature?

[Richard Barrett]

At 17:15 08/10/2001 -0700, Marc MERLIN wrote:
>On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 10:05:13AM +0200, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> > > > Does Mailman provide a feature for searching archives?
> > > That would be an awesome feature...
> > > The mailman archives are all text based, so they should be easy to 
> search
> > > and index.
> >
> > There's a patch at Sourceforge which adds this functionality.
> > You can try it e.g. at http://dotgnu.org/pipermail/developers/
>
>That's pretty cool.
>Does this patch take into account public and private lists?
>(the biggest reason I have never implemented archive search at my company is
>that the archiver has to know which lists are private and the users and
>their passwords before allowing a search on a private list)
>
>Marc
>--

The following patches integrate the htdig (http://www.htdig.org/) search 
engine with Mailman.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=444879&group_id=103&atid=300103

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=444884&group_id=103&atid=300103

The main features of the patch, from its sourceforge summary are:

1. per list search facility with a search form on the
list's TOC page.

2. maintenance of privacy of private archives which
requires the user to establish their credentials via
the normal private archive access before any access
via htdig is allowed.

3. a common base URL for both public and private
archive access via htsearch results so that htdig
indices are unaffected by changing an archive from
private to public and vice versa. All access to
archives via htdig is controlled by a new wrapped cgi-
bin script called htdig.py.

4. a new cron activated script and extra crontab entry
which runs htdig regularly to maintain the per list
search indices.

5. automatic creation, deletion and maintenance of
htdig configuration files and such. Beyond installing
htdig and telling Mailman where it is via mm_cfg you
do not have to do any other setup. Well not quite you
do have to set up a single per installation symlink to
allow htdig to find the automatically generated per
list htdig configuration files.