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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 2:37 PM, David Jeske <davidj at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can you share something about dependency philosophy (besides licensing) in
> Mailman?

Well, for the official poop you'll have to wait for Barry, but AFAICS archivers
aren't restricted to Storm + RESTish (which is what Mailman itself uses)
because they're separate applications.  If the archiver/web UI is going to be
distributed *with* Mailman, Barry would probably prefer Storm + Django
because that's what Mailman/Protorius (core and admin web UI, resp.) are
using.  But I imagine that's negotiable as long as everything is free software.

I don't think the database backend much matters, but Mailman and Django
are both happy to use sqlite, I believe.

> I'm not a fan of javascript client-side rendering because of the generally
> poor performance, poor mobile compatibility, and lack of benefit for this
> kind of application.

Not my pidgin, you'll need to talk to Toshio/Barry about that.
>> AIUI, the current philosophy is that
>>
>> (1) the communication from Mailman to the archivers
>> will be via LMTP/SMTP, including a Mailman-specific
>> header to identify the message's permalink (currently
>> the SHA1 hash of the message ID in BASE32
>> format, IIRC); and
>
> Using SMTP for an included archiver would require it be a long running
> server instead of merely a handler.

Sure, but you're already running a sufficient server, namely
your MTA.  Of course that may not be efficient.  If an mbox or
maildir storage is sufficient, any decent MTA/MDA can do that
for you.  If not, I don't think that writing a separate handler is
a big deal; I'm just saying that AIUI the configurable Handler
provided with Mailman will certainly know how to do LMTP/
SMTP.

> Are we talking about third-party-site archivers here?

That is the motivation for choosing ?MTP as the default
transport to archivers, yes.

Steve