[Mailman-Users] Archives and searching

[Les Niles]

On Tue, 21 Sep 1999 13:44:26 -0500 (CDT) Christopher Lindsey <lindsey at ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>Since pipermail is no longer being developed (at least that's what was
>announced on the list a while back) and the current CVS snapshot now
>supports the definition of an external archiving program, I recommend
>using MHonArc.

and

On Wed, 22 Sep 1999 13:28:27 +1000 Bek Oberin <gossamer at tertius.net.au> wrote:
>How can I set up a search engine like htdig that uses the regular
>mailman (email+password) security?
>
>If I point it at http://hostname/pipermail/listname/ it's going to only
>index the enter-your-information pages and not the content, correct?
>How can I get around this?  And how can I -then- require actual users to
>enter their email+password to access the info?

Wilma is a search engine and web interface built on top of MHonArc
and glimpse.  (ftp://ftp.hpc.uh.edu/pub/wilma/)  It works nicely
with mailman.  I set it up to build its archive in the usual
mailman/archives/private/list_name/ directory, fetching the
messages from the list_name.mbox/list_name.mbox file.  (Actually,
a link to that file with a month-specific name, since I've got
wilma set up to make month-by-month archives.)  I haven't delved
into how pipermail is wired into mailman so I just left it all
there; there's no problem with it and wilma stepping on each other,
as long as wilma is configured to ignore the pipermail HTML
archives.

When users access the archives they do so through the "private" cgi
program, via a URL something like
http://mysite.com/mailman/private/list_name/9909/ (for the Sept
1999 archives), which means that mailman's password security
mechanism gets invoked just like for the pipermail archives.  It
worked surprisingly easily.

  -les  les at 2pi.com