[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Kevin McCann]

On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 15:12, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 15:06, Kevin McCann wrote:
> 
> > To me, this is the single most important part. How do you intend to
> > store the messages? 
> > 
> > Maybe others don't give a fig but I think that if archived messages were
> > to be stored in an easy-to-access database then life would be good.
> 
> I agree, although I don't know if I'd store everything in MySQL.

I'd love to have these database fields in a messages table at my
disposal:

id  (unique to system, not message-id)
listname
subject
date
from
body
message-id
references
mime_headers

This would make it very easy to build useful and flexible web apps.
The need is there. I can smell it. ;-) Bottom line, the easier you make
access to all of the little bits of a message that are important in one
way or another, the more widespread development will be. And the faster
we'll see really, really cool mailing list-focused web apps that foster
communication, collaboration and community building, all for the
betterment of mankind.

:-)

- Kevin



> 
> There are a couple of ways I could see slicing things.  You could store
> one message per file a la MH, with some elaboration to avoid inode
> exhaustion.  Or you could store everything in an mbox file with a file
> offset index.  Or perhaps store everything to an nntp server (Twisted
> would make a nice platform for this <wink>).
> 
> What would then be in the database would be records providing easy
> lookup by message-id (at least) into the on-disk message store.
> 
> Also, I really want the next generation archiver to do everything
> through cgi (or equivalent programmatic interface).  The ability to
> massage the messages on the way out to me outweighs the benefits of
> vending messages directly from the file system.
> 
> -Barry
> 
>