[Mailman-Users] Search tool for Mailman Archives

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Thu, 2010-12-09 at 07:49 -0500, Paul Tomblin wrote:
> If you find one that allows you to still use the mailman login system
> so that only members of a list can view the archives, please let me
> know.  I looked at a few archive searchers, but it appears they all
> either make the list archives public, or you can do a htaccess thing
> which will require you to change the password every time somebody
> leaves the list and tell all the current members the new password,
> etc.

About three years ago I worked out a complete system for integrating
Namazu with Mailman, and it's still successfully in use on my production
servers.   You can find it at <http://www.fmp.com/namazu>.  This is the
guts of the system.  I've subsequently added the ability to mailman to
read the index.html file in the Pipermail archive in a PHP context which
allows the use of an accessory list of lists which are authorized to use
the namazu search, while others don't offer this ability.

There are a few glitches in this, since the integration of namazu and
mailman is imperfect by nature.  Keep in mind that all this was written
three years ago, for a previous version of Mailman.  Additionally,
Namazu's date sort is, or was, dependent on the file dates in the
pipermail structure, rather than parsing dates from files, so if you
move your archives to a new system the date sort becomes quite broken if
the file creation dates are munged.  This is a namazu issue.  The author
of Namazu struggles with English, and I have no knowledge of Japanese,
so I wasn't able to get very far in resolving this.

I put quite a lot of work into this project, but have moved on and am
doing other things, so if someone with the knowledge and skills to do so
wants to grab it and run with it, updating it and improving it, please
have at.  I've forgotten a lot of the details that went into the design
of this, although the project contains a lot of documentation which I
wrote at the time, so if you have problems, read the code and figure it
out if you can.  Don't ask me for support.  Just make any necessary
changes or improvements, send them to me, and I'll post them to the
collection on the web server.

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "In an open world,    |     PGP public key
FMP Computer Services |    who needs Windows  |      available at
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http://www.fmp.com    |                       |