[Mailman-Users] Search Archive Feature?

[Richard Barrett]

At 14:56 19/10/2001 -0400, Mark T. Valites wrote:
>I've been looking at implementing these two patches into a new mailman 
>install I am doing here.  The documentation seems to be missing though. 
>I'm able to patch the mailman source, but what to do after that I'm a bit 
>lost as for what to do.  While this isn't a mailing list for these 
>pathces, I was wondering if anyone has had any experience installing these 
>patchs, ideas of where I can find more info on them, and maybe if anyone 
>knows if they can be added to an existing mailman install after it has 
>already been implemented and used.

I realised that my earlier response did not answer the question about 
adding the patches to an existing Mailman installation.

Proceed as follows:

1. remove the Mailman user id's crontab entries to stop Mailman doing 
stuff  and stop the MTA (sendmail or whatever) on the machine running 
Mailman to avoid things changing under your feet while installing the patches.

2. apply the patches in your Mailman distribution directory

3. re-run ./configure using the same parameters as you did originally (look 
in config.status if you need to remind yourself of what you did then)

4. re-run make install

5. go to your installed Mailman directory

6. re-run bin/check_perms and take any necessary action

7. do the mailman-htdig stuff described in the patched INSTALL file in your 
patched distribution directory, that is:

         a. adding the link to htdig's $CONFDIR

         b. edit Mailman/mm_cfg.py to enable HTDIG, provide rundig's 
location and the name of htdig link

8. if the crontab file you use is not cron/crontab.in then copy the lines 
to run nightly_htdig from cron/crontab.in to your crontab file

9. re-start your MTA on the mailman machine

10. re-add mailman's crontab

Note that until cron/nightly_htdig is run no list will be searchable but do 
not run it by hand just yet.

 From this point, all newly created lists with archives will be fully htdig 
enabled i.e. the search form will appear on their TOC pages when the first 
post to the list is made and the archive is thus reachable. Also their 
archive pages will have the search optimisation strings generated by the 
code in the first patch.

Existing lists will become htdig enabled, i.e. the search form will be 
added to their TOC pages, when they next receive a posting. Also the search 
optimisation strings generated by the code in the first patch will be in 
all newly created archive pages. It is probably worth sending a message to 
all your archived mail lists at this point to get the htdiggy stuff done 
for the list.

Existing archive pages for postings will not have embedded in them the 
search optimisation strings generated by the code in the first patch. You 
can update these existing pages by running the bin/arch script to rebuild 
the archive of exisitng lists. You do not have to do this but I would 
recommend it.

Using the mailman user id, run cron/nightly_htdig by hand and this will 
build htdigs indices for each mail archive that has a search form on its 
TOC page. This will get existing archives searchable in advance of the 
overnight htdig re-indexing run.

I hope I haven't forget anything and that your existing archives are all 
searchable. I'm sure I can rely on people telling me about the mistakes 
I've mad in the above.



>Richard Barrett wrote:
>
>>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