[Mailman-Developers] RFC 5064 Archived-At header

[Barry Warsaw]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello MHonArc and Mailman developers.

RFC 5064 describes the Archived-At header, which is used to point  
directly to the archived version of a mailing list mail message.  The  
value of this header could also be used in a message body footer, such  
as the type that Mailman typically adds to its list copy of the  
message.  Supporting this would be a big improvement in usability for  
mailing lists and is an often requested feature of Mailman.

We have been having some off-list discussions recently between Jeff  
Marshall and Jeff Breidenbach of the Mail-Archive.com, Earl Hood of  
the MHonArc project and myself on approaches that would provide for  
support of RFC 5064 Archived-At headers.  The RFC itself is agnostic  
on how to calculate the value of this header, but it does provide some  
suggestions.  On the mailman-developers mailing list a while ago we  
discussed several ways of calculating this header, and in our private  
discussions, we've refined our thoughts.  We're now at something of an  
impasse, where the specific approach requires us to make some trade- 
offs between implementation choices and usability.  It's now time to  
get your feedback.

I've just updated the current proposal on the Mailman wiki:

http://wiki.list.org/x/yQAM

See specifically the Open Issues section.  The most straight-forward  
way to implement this leads to long, unusable (in our opinion) urls.   
Shortening the urls would require quite a bit of additional  
implementation complexity.  What to do?

It's time to open this up to your ideas, but let me say that from  
Mailman(3)'s perspective, the exact algorithm probably doesn't matter  
much.  I have a bzr branch that implements the interfaces and  
infrastructure for archiver plugins, so if MHonArc, Pipermail, and  
Mail-Archive.com all chose different algorithms, we can fairly easily  
write a different plugin for each.  Still, it would be good to  
standardize on a usable, implementable approach.

I invite you to read the wiki page, and comment either there or as a  
follow up to this message.  I am not on the mhonarc-dev mailing list.

Cheers,
- -Barry
P.S. mhonarc-devs: I apologize in advance for the replybot on my email  
address.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Darwin)

iEYEARECAAYFAkhsXCIACgkQ2YZpQepbvXFvNwCgg6jS/6NgmwYMa1W+9786Qd63
d00AoLJ99UEbKmvoBRUGbVi+B+PHJZEk
=Lzo8
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----