[Mailman-Users] NEWBIE Seeking Reference Materials/Developers

[Gregory Mokhin]

Drew Tenenholz wrote:

> They have purchased a Mac OS XServe (dual 1.25GHz), running OS X 10.3 
> (Panther), Apache 1.3 and Mailman 2.1.4 and want to take advantage of 
> the pre-installed Mailman

Good, but it seems it is not so easy to use pre-installed software for
custom tasks, especially when the required level of customization is high.

> What is required to insure postings appear in Cyrillic text?  Will 
> they be UNICODE or HTML/charset encoded?  (i.e. How will the Oracle 
> 9i system handle the posts, assuming that it gets them at all?  We 
> want to be able to search that database in Cyrillic after all.)

Use Unicode, utf-8. Though database servers are usually able to handle
different encodings, doing this 8-bit encodings for Cyrillic is a
mess. You'll need to deal with at least 4 different popular encodings
for Cyrillic that are not totally compatible to each other. But all of
them can be mapped to utf-8.

> Our UNIX/Perl programmer has already modified the message headers to 
> include a necessary custom header to integrate with an Oracle 
> database archiving system for searching and displaying posts.

If you need just multilanguage archiving and search options, you might
want to read some docs on how to set up custom archiver (hypermail or
mhonarc) and use some indexing engine (e.g., mnogosearch) with a
database, such as Oracle, as a backend, for search capabilities. That
will be easier than developing such system from scratch, and surely
you will be able to get much more help with this on the mailing lists.

Regards,
Gregory