[Systers-dev] [Gsoc10] Improve Mailman Archive Access/Searching

[Terri Oda]

kartik rustagi wrote:
> Also I received a suggestion from Nandeep (Thanks) regarding keeping the
> dependencies of any probable solution minimum. But before we go into the
> detailed implementation of any feature we need to know what all features are
> mailman developers working on. While doing a search regarding any previous
> discussion regarding archiving/searching, I found the following thread:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg10396.html
> 
> Its quite an old discussion but they essentially discuss archiving/searching
> in mailman. Has anyone over here interacted with mailman developers
> regarding the status of any ongoing effort (if any) in this direction? If
> not then I believe this is the right time to get them in the loop.

As Robin pointed out, that message was from me (and I'm the one who put 
it into the systers wiki to get people started).

At the time (as you can see in the thread) some folk did some research 
to see if Message-ids would be good for providing stable URLs (The 
answer is mostly yes, although we likely will want to hash them down to 
something shorter).  I did a bunch of requirements gathering, and did a 
bunch of mock-ups that never made it out of my own notebooks and hard 
drives.

AFAIK, no one's done much since.  I'm nominally in charge of the archive 
effort for Mailman, in that I'm the person who's expressed the most 
interest, so I'd probably be among the first to hear if real work was 
done on it.

This is why I was so interested in doing archives for one of the Systers 
GSoC projects: there's a real potential for this to become the new 
archive for Mailman.  Note that I'm talking about Mailman 3, since 2.1 
is currently feature frozen.  Mailman 3 is in alpha now, and archives 
are among the things that aren't ready yet that no one's taken a stab 
at.  Currently, the only plan for archives in 3 is to make it very easy 
for people to use mail-archives.com if they want better public archives. 
  But this obviously doesn't help groups like systers who need private 
archives.

> Regarding the searching feature, there were some efforts in the past and
> some patches in this regard do exist. But most of them are defunct and based
> on dependencies which are no longer supported. I think the final output of
> the search should look some thing like this:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/

I'll happily agree that mail-archive.com is pretty fantastic as a way to 
show list archives and search them.  I'd also like to note that the 
mail-archive guys are really quite awesome, very supportive of Mailman 
(including significant financial support), and have provided some very 
useful input to previous archives discussions.  I also owe Jeff for 
being horrendously late for dinner when I met him, but that's not 
related. ;)

  Terri