[Mailman-Developers] Hooks for external archivers

[Gareth McCaughan]

On Thursday 2006-06-01 23:08, "Fil" wrote:

> @ Gareth McCaughan <gmccaughan at synaptics-uk.com> :
> > Suppose you're using Mailman with a separate archiving system
> > such as Lurker or mod_mbox or something. Then there are a few
> 
> Is there some kind of tutorial on mod_mbox somewhere? I had never heard
> about this project and find the example lists no less than excellent

I'm not aware of one. I agree that mod_mbox is beautiful, much nicer
than Lurker. The things that worry me a bit about it:

  - The AJAX-y stuff basically only works on Gecko-based browsers.
    That would be Firefox, Mozilla, and their less common relations.
    It doesn't work, for instance, on IE or Opera or Safari or
    Konqueror.

  - I've found one situation where it simply breaks and refuses
    to show you an e-mail. (If you have an attachment whose name
    is a quoted string containing spaces, the parsing is wrong
    and it produces broken XML and everything goes pear-shaped.)
    I have a quick-and-dirty patch for this bug, but the presence
    of a bug like this doesn't inspire me with confidence.

  - It makes more assumptions than I'm happy with about the mboxen
    it reads. They have to contain a List-Post header somewhere;
    they have to be named in a certain way. Again, these aren't
    major problems but I worry that they may be symptoms of a
    deeper pathology, namely a general preference for writing code
    that works in one particular context and not worrying if it
    doesn't work right in general.

  - (I may be misremembering this one.) I don't think there's any
    way to process messages incrementally as they arrive, so I'm
    not sure how you'd use mod_mbox for a busy mailing list. Now,
    the Apache project seems to use it for a whole lot of busy
    mailing lists, so maybe this is all fine, but I worry a bit,
    and I notice that the mail I sent yesterday to dev at httpd.apache.org
    reporting the aforementioned bug still hasn't appeared in the
    mod_mbox-based archives, so maybe they handle it by just not
    running the updater very often.

Also, there's some sign of support for searching, but it's not
clear how much it can do or how to make it work and it requires
this separate Lucene4c thing, and I'm lazy.

But, still, it's awfully shiny and I'd love to love it. Perhaps
when it's matured a little more. :-)

-- 
g