[Discuss] list archive viewer

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

John Abreau wrote:
> I've made a first pass at setting up mhonarc.
> http://blu.org/mhonarc/discuss/

Nice. I gather it had easy hooks to add your own headers/footers?

A step in the right direction.


Richard Pieri wrote:
> Tom Metro wrote:
>> ...again no integrated search engine,
> 
> That's a feature. Let Google and Bing and whatever eventually displaces
> them handle search. ...and you don't have to maintain it on a day to
> day basis.

Yes, I generally agree. A proper local search engine would let you take
advantage of the metadata to do things like searching for an author or
within a specified message date range.

But a Google site search box is probably good enough, and far less
effort for BLU to maintain. So yes, we should add a search box to the
MHonArc header.


I wrote:
> mail-archive.com offers up a different sort of integration possibility.
> They provide the algorithm they use to calculate an archive post's URL,
> so you can add this code to your mailing list manager and have the
> "permalink" for archived message appear in the footer of the distributed
> message.
> 
> Gmane supports the same idea using the message ID...
> which should be even easier to integrate into a mailing list manager.

It turns out there is an RFC covering this idea:

The Archived-At Message Header Field
December 2007
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5064.txt

and more importantly, newer versions of mailman support it. Added in 3.0
alpha 2 (03-Jan-2009):

  The permalink proposal for supporting RFC 5064 has been adopted.

It also adds:

  Support added for a local MHonArc archiver, as well as archiving
  automatically in the remote Mail-Archive.com service.


BLU is running 2.1.12. The current stable version is 2.1.16 (16-Oct-2013).

3.0 is still in beta, and has been in development for many years (as you
can see above, an early version dates back to 2009). This wiki page
covers it:
http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Mailman+3.0

and says there is no ETA for the release, and lists a bunch of things
still left to be done. Unfortunately the wiki doesn't offer any
assessment of the usability of the current beta version. I guess for
that you'd have to ask on the developers list.

This other page:
http://pythonhosted.org/mailman/src/mailman/docs/START.html#beta-release
does express an opinion:

  This is a beta release. The developers believe it has sufficient
  functionality to provide full mailing list services, but it is not yet
  ready for production use.

  The Mailman 3 beta releases are being provided to give developers and
  other interested people an early look at the next major version, and
  site administrators a chance to prepare for an eventual upgrade. The
  core list management and post distribution functionality is now
  complete. However, unlike Mailman 2 whose web interface and archives
  were tightly integrated with the core, Mailman 3 exposes a REST
  administrative interface to the web, communicates with archivers via
  decoupled interfaces, and leaves summary, search, and retrieval of
  archived messages to a separate application (a simple implementation
  is provided). The web interface (known as Postorius) and archiver
  (known as Hyperkitty) are in separate development.


There is also a 2.2 branch started in 2006 that has some
3.0 features backported to it, but the wiki gives the impression that
this branch has been abandoned in favor of 3.0.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/