[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Craig Loomis writes:

 >    Globally unique IDs, hashed IDs, etc., are very appealing from  
 > various CS-y and techie points of view, but are simply not memorable  
 > to humans or knowable by dumb external programs. I think as much, or  
 > more, effort should be put into delivering a straightforwardly useable  
 > naming scheme as goes into making an arbitrary message recoverable  
 > from anywhere.  Basically, "friendly URLs" should be a primary  
 > requirement, not an optional afterthought for careless geeks like me  
 > to get wrong later....

Friendly URLs *are* a primary requirement.  The point is that to make
them *reliable* as well, either a globally unique ID is needed, or
individual site admins must suffer through hard-to-document
constraints on what they can do with their archives.  Note that the
system you describe based on the post_id member demonstrates the value
of a unique ID.

"Sufficient reliability" is not a tough requirement for an individual
admin to achieve, as you have demonstrated.  It's much more exacting
for the Mailman developers, who need to satisfy both sites with
different needs *and* archivers with different features.

 >    As an aside on other discussions, can you get away without using  
 > Message-ID or Date?

No.  Not all recipients of the messages get them through the list.
Once again, Mailman developers have to consider that situation, while
in your situation you may not need to worry about it.