[Mailman-Developers] any interest in a new built-in web-archive? (i.e. pipermail replacement)

[David Jeske]

I'm writing to find out the state of and philosophy surrounding pipermail
in mailman, to see if there is a productive way to provide some
code/development-time to that part of mailman.

I know there are several decent third-party archivers out there, but many
of the mailing list archives I browse regularly are using pipermail because
it's the mailman default.... one less thing to install, administer, and
upgrade.  Unfortunately, pipermail doesn't do a good job formatting
messages for html.. (messages with no line-breaks are the most annoying
problem I regularly run into)

I've written code for this a number of times (eGroups, Yahoo Groups, Google
Groups). I also released an open-source python/clearsilver/sqlite based
archiver with redundant text-eliding, a few different thread views, and
search...  ( http://www.clearsilver.net/archive/ ) which is hardly used
both because I don't try to popularize it, and because many sites just
leave the default (pipermail).

If there is some code (and time) I can contribute to mailman/pipermail, I'd
like to do so. I'm writing this message to "take a temperature" and find
out what, if any, contributions would be appreciated the mailman
development team. I could imagine answers like:

a) pipermail is fine... if you want to fix a bug or two submit a patch, but
we don't want to improve it
b) we're ditching pipermail entirely... in the future sites will have to
choose an install an external archiver
c) we'd love pipermail to be improved... but we still want it to be simple,
static-html, and dependency free
d) we'd love a dynamic-ui replacement for pipermail... as long as it uses
the same cgi/templating model as mailman ui

Thoughts? Is there any help I can offer up here?