[Mailman-Users] Requirements for a new archiver

Iain Bapty i.bapty at student.umist.ac.uk
Mon Oct 27 13:00:10 CET 2003


Hi,

For those of you that don't know I am currently working on a archive 
component for Mailman as part of my degree. The interface to the archive 
shall be based on the ideas in Ka-Ping Yee's paper on his Zest 
prototype. Over the past two weeks I have been looking at requirements 
and have the following. These are in no specific order. Due to the time 
constraints on my project (I am to only spend 200 hours in total on it, 
including writing reports, presentations etc) there is a limit to the 
amount I can do.

Functional Requirements
The archive component should

   1. store email discussions.
   2. integrate with Mailman.
   3. provide a web-based interface to those email-discussions.
   4. provide an interface that threads discussions by their content. (ZEST)
   5. provide an interface that threads discussions by e-mail replies.
   6. allow for full-text searching of the archives.
   7. allow for filtering by date, author, and/or topic.
   8. be MIME aware.
   9. allow archives to be set as public or private.
  10. allow posts to be added, deleted, and modified through web interface.
  11. allow archives to be locked to prevent modification.
  12. allow postings to be emailed.
  13. allow postings to be referenced externally.

 Non-Functional Requirements

   1. Maintainable
   2. Secure
   3. Scalable

The minimum I am planning on doing is the first 5 functional 
requirements restricted by the first 2 non-functional requirements.

There are a two reasons I am posting this.

Is there anything obvious that I have missed?

Which of the functional requirements, 6 to 13, do you feel are the most 
important? (As part of my report I have to analyse the requirements 
captured)

Any feedback is very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Iain







More information about the Mailman-Users mailing list