[Mailman-Users] Archives in YYYYMM format

[Martin MOKREJŠ]

Hi,
  I find it hard to convert easily from other email-list softwares to
mailman. Why does mailman have to use for example 2004-October/ directory
instead of 200410/ ? Is that configurable somewhere? Will October change
to Říjen when I use LANG=CS_cz? Would that also rename already existing
directories to comply with the new $LANG? ;)

  Just imagine, everyone used to have a working installation of majordomo
or smartlist or similar. They used YYYYMM syntax. Stacked on those, often
wilma used to be very nice cgi interface to index files created by glimpse
(started automatically by cronjobs or eveen better, whenever an email was
written into an archive by say a procmail filter).

  I miss this (I believe very typical and logical) setup with mailman.
It would be very easy to add wilma support even now to mailman ... support
means I have to make softlinks right now using:

#!/bin/sh
find . -type d | grep -v attachments | \
perl -e '$cal{January}="01"; $cal{February}="02"; $cal{March}="03"; $cal{April}="04"; $cal{May}="05"; $cal{June}="06"; $cal{July}="07"; $cal{August}="08"; $cal{September}="09"; $cal{October}="10"; $cal{November}="11"; $cal{December}="12"; while (<>) { chomp(); $old=$_; foreach $month (keys %cal) { if ($old=~m/$month/) { $new=$old; $new=~s/-$month/$cal{$month}/; system("ln -s $old $new"); } } }'

Great. Now wilma will find the HTML archives. But glimpse has to
index plaintext and one shouldn't index HTML crap, so ...

I have to make the raw archives accessible using the old-fashioned
way: split all emails in mailman's archive (already FAQ I guess), store
each message into a separate file under YYYYMM/ directory. Run glimpse
inside that YYYYMM/ direct ... and finally enjoy using wilma.
Is this hassle necessary? I believe not. So why cannot one
have the old setup: email archives in files $listname.YYYYMM, html
output of any txt2html converters either in $listname.YYYYMM/ or YYYYMM/ ,
or both? :-)

As mailman doesn't provide any easy hooks to do some action whenever an
email comes, I'll have to hack in procmail to be started. Grr.
I did that some years ago for majordomo-1, later for ezmlm, then for
smartlist and finally I thought let's go for this mailman thing, it
should be great accroding to refs ... Well, I don't like the default
pipermail output, so I had to find patches to get the old, nice MHonArc
output. There seem to be htdig+namazu patches, the the "Search" button
doesn't seem to be very powerfull, compared to the full-text search options
wilma has presented. Even worse, I don't understand the namazu thing, maybe
I'm stupid but the docs on teh web did not explain me a lot. :(

Using wilma+glimpse I could have searched just some monthly-based archives,
allow for typos in the query ... Imagine, I can't have all that just
because of the damm archives in single huge file. Why?!
Please, do something in this respect. Of course I'll write few more
one-liners, install one cronjob or improve procmail filters to exec()
glimpse indexer whenever an email comes ..., but is that really necessary?
Isn't that already available and just hidden somewhere in mailman docs?
Thanks for nice software anyway a keep up the work! I can at least offer testing.
:))
Martin