[Mailman-Developers] Re: Requirements for a new archiver

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 16:49:14 +0100 
Brad Knowles <brad.knowles at skynet.be> wrote:
> At 2:30 PM -0600 2003/10/28, David Champion wrote:

> You cannot assume a homogenous client mix.  Moreover, you can't assume
> broad support for less common protocols like IMAP or NNTP.

Apparently assumable/desirable protocols enclude:

  SMTP
  HTTP
  XML/RPC (on HTTP)
  SOAP (on HTTP or SMTP)

Mailman currently supports the first two, with the caveat that it has no
SMTP retrieval supports and no a priori primary key for HTTP.  Moving to
a store which supports a Message ID primary key doesn't change the
protocol list (tho it may extend it).  However moving to such a store
allows a simple extension to allow key-based retrieval via SMTP and
HTTP, which are the primary protocols.  Extending that down the road to
XML/RPC and SOAP on any transport wouldn't be difficult, especially in
the Python world (I'm beating on SOAPpy's MIME supports as I type this).

What form the backing store takes is orthogonal to this aspect of the
discussion.  The key features are a priori key definition and key-based
retrieval.  Get those two and the rest become relatively trivial.  The
exact form of the backing store is irrelevant.  Nobody cares.  Protocol
access and protocol behaviour (API) are the important bits.

To date three backing stores have been proposed: Twisted's NNTP
implementation, IMAP, and SQL.  All could work.  All could match the
above discussion perfectly.  Implementing each would require
significantly different levels of effort.  I'd posit that Twisted is the
cheapest/easiest route simply due to it being pythonic and small.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.