[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Iain Bapty]

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? 
>>    
>>
Undecided, I am only just starting the development stage now 
(overlapping with the end of my requirements). This is a decision I will 
have to make over the next two weeks and as I am relatively 
inexperienced I shall be asking a lot of questions and doing lots of 
research. I included it as a requirement, even though it is an obvious 
one, so I can relate my design directly back to each requirement.

>>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 have to explore as many of the options as time permits for my report. 
Although I like the idea of being able to do an SQL style query based on 
header information which would be stored as seperate fields.

>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>).
>  
>
Twisted eh? I will have to look into that.

>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.
>
This is where my ignorance shines, could you elaborate a bit on this 
part please? By this, do you mean you want all queries to be setup and 
executed by a user through the web interface? Why can't messages be 
massaged from the file system?

Thanks

Iain