[Mailman-Developers] Google Summer of Code: Integration of Search Code

[Terri Oda]

On 03/27/2012 03:31 AM, Shayan Md wrote:

> I was working on mm3. But systers' indexer/searcher was implemented for
> mailman2. So it must be easy for to integrate it with mm2.

Actually, the systers indexer was designed to work with mboxes (because 
I had a pile of data in that format that the students could use) but 
otherwise knows pretty much nothing about mailman 2 or 3.  Other than 
handling mbox instead of maildir, which is only a matter of changing 
parsers, it shouldn't matter which it's integrated with. This was a 
design decision at the time, as Mailman 3 was coming but still too 
incomplete to test with when the code was written.

> Looks like archiver for mm3 is still in development stage. As far as I
> understand searcher depends on the srchiver, right? Not completely but it
> somewhat depends on archiver. I am not sure if searcher can be implemented
> without archiver. If possible I can implement for mm3 also.

Searcher and archiver are interdependent *if* we want to share caches 
and data stores, which we probably do for any installation with larger 
archives where storing 2 copies vs 4 of each message would make a 
difference.  Plus, many archive views may be basically searches 
"messages in the last month" "messages which are replies to messageid 
$foo" etc.

Ideally, anyone working on search will interact heavily with the 
archiver and probably usability folk at the beginning so that you can 
figure out what data structures you need to store and index and what use 
cases you'll need to make fast.

  Terri