[Mailman-Users] How to set up an archive of current and past city council public notices.

[Brad Knowles]

At 5:22 AM -0400 2004-07-17, Don Saklad wrote:

>            Here's an example of contrary Boston city council's
>            public records that city of boston city council offices are
>            not willing to make available on the web with the full text
>            of the public document nor by email formatted in plain text ASCII

	Note that there are some freely available programs to convert 
Microsoft Word documents to HTML and other forms.  For example, see 
the program "wv", <http://freshmeat.net/projects/wv/>.  You could use 
programs like this (or StarOffice) to do the conversion and then post 
the resulting documents to the mailing list.

	It shouldn't be too hard to work up a way to automatically pull 
down the latest documents, convert them, and then post the 
conversions (or the links to the conversions) to the mailing list.


	However, all this would need to be done outside of Mailman. 
There are no facilities within the current version to execute 
arbitrary format conversion programs (such as wv), and I think this 
would represent a serious security risk if someone tried to add the 
feature.  Supporting simple automated HTML conversion via lynx is 
potentially dangerous enough, I don't think anyone would want to go 
beyond that.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.