[Mailman-Developers] Parsing and Rendering rfc2822

[emf]

Brad Knowles wrote:

>>> Archiving and MLM (Mailing List Manager) functionality can be
>>> orthogonal to each other.
>> I can imagine - but have never used - a mailing list where access to
>> past emails is 'orthogonal' to the use of the mailing list.
> 
> Majordomo, older versions of Mailman, as just two examples of many.
> 
> In fact, most MLMs don't necessarily have integrated archive components. 

I'm aware that many do not offer web interfaces to their archives. I 
know of none that doesn't provide access to their *archives*.

Majordomo has offered an email way to get access to the archives for as 
long as I can recall, as does ezmlm, etc.

One of the things that set Mailman apart in the early days was its web 
friendlyness and integration; this makes it even harder for me to see 
how the archive's web interface is separate from Mailman's UI.

> And there are plenty of people who don't care for Pipermail and instead
> integrate a third-party archive system into Mailman, in accordance with
> the instructions that we provide in the FAQ Wizard.

This doesn't strike me as evidence that an archive is orthogonal to the 
function of a mailing list; Rims are not orthogonal to the use of a car, 
yet many people replace them.

>  but we need to make sure we don't lose sight of these other archive systems

I wholeheartedly agree. I don't think we currently have them in sight: 
we provide a way to turn off the existing archive system and offer to 
run popen() on the command of their choosing.

The FAQ seems to suggest that we don't have it in sight as well:

http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.004.htp

It seems to me that having an URL-accessable xml/rss/rdf/atom feed of 
the list would be much more "in sight" than the current state of affairs.

> There are at least a couple of alternatives mentioned in the FAQ Wizard,
> and John has clearly found at least one more.

I have been looking around on this subject on and off for a few years. I 
have found a small number of OSS archiving programs:

* MHonArc is in Perl and appears to be based on the RegExp Ninja school.
* Lurker is in C++/XSLT.

Neither presents an interface that appears substantially improved off of 
that provided by Pipermail from my perspective.

The other projects I can find are abandoned.

> But this is a pretty big undertaking.

Well, it sounds like we're down to a "show me the code" sort of moment; 
I think with kid + python's built in email module I can whip something 
up that meets the low bar set by Pipermail within the allotted schedule.

~ethan fremen