[Mailman-Developers] Moderation comment interface change

[Christopher G. Petrilli]

On Mon, Feb 08, 1999 at 05:28:35PM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
> > [discussion of BABYL]
> > Yup, and I've never had a problem with it not finding the message
> > start/end correctly.  I suspect it's about as bulletproof as any
> > non-database/singel-file solution can be!
> 
> Quite.  FWLIW FIDO used a not-dissimilar format.

So this might be one format to talk to---I need to look at extending
Python's built in libraries to support this format on top of the
existing ones... though it does need more features, it'd at least have
the basics.

> > Ok, this I can see... that would be helpful, and shouldn't be that
> > hard to arrange, honestly... we've talked several times about
> > having an "archive filter" that does something in a black box, but
> > it's important to the main mailing list manager.
> 
> Aye.  I'm tempted to hack it in myself but I don't really have a
> feel for the flow of the base design of MailMan right now (and my
> Python skills are a little rusty).

I've got the Python stuff pretty well in hand, but it's the flow of
Mailman that makes my brain hurt :-)  I've not really tried to
understand it yet, since I've been hacking up the parser for Zope for a
while... and after looking at a parser for a couple weeks, the rest just
looks too foofooie :-)

> Its also a significant engineering effort with a _long_ test and
> burn in period behind it.  This is human-sourced data with Microsoft 
> seasoning: Expect to spend 90% of your time figuring out how to
> handle 3% of the weird exceptions.

Well, if you keep the features to a minimum it's easier :-) Part of the
problem SOME software companies have with debugging is that they add new
features during teh debug cycle, and add features nobody uses---so of
course nobody breaks them, until they do something to totally unrelated
:-)

> I'm currently playing about with having MHonArc generate pages which
> contain a PHP3 blob referencing a DB entry which contains
> web-browser annotations and list-owner comments (cf PHP's own
> annotated manual).  It looks like a workable idea that could
> actually be fairly useful.

My fear of such solutions is that it becomes more and more complex to
debug sshould it break... but that's just me, and only me.

> Quite.  I approve of MHonArc's approach: silently ignore duplicate
> and missing MessageID's.  A slightly better approach would be to
> pseudo-generate MessageID's for messages which miss them (say a
> simple hash function of the message body), and then only ignore
> duplicate hashes, but its a very small gain for a very small impact
> problem.

This is a difficult issue, and I don't agree with "silently ignoring"
anything... always note it in the archives... that's my problem with
editable archives... then again I just got done dealing with evidentiary
problems with security audit trails :-)

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli
| petrilli@amber.org