Re: Packaging of mailinglist archives
On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 08:32:17AM +0100, Jan Kesten wrote:
> Hi again,
'ello.
FWIW the X.1 numbering scheme is usually for NMU uploads (but that
probably doesn't apply to native packages?)
[...]
> > Do you have a reader interface for the mbox files? Maybe the scripts
> > from lists.debian.org so one can browse the MLs via a webbrowser and
> > apache. A search function and maybe search-in-thread would be nice.
> >
> > No everyone might want to import the mbox files into their mail
> > client.
>
> Indeed - it's some of future project for me ;-) I have some rendering
> done locally, but handling threads isn't quite simple (guess you have a
> monthly mbox including a thread that started before this month).
>
> Browsing the archive through a webinterface will be nice and thats what
> comes in near future, but I don't know right now who I will implement this
>
> a) use a seperate package for each format (mbox, maildir, html) - to be
> created out of one source package (didn't do this before, but, I can
> learn :-) Side effect is that there will be muliple data in different
> packages
Right, that's wasteful.
> b) use a singe package per archive that does conversation at install
> time (debconf?)
Good, but it doesn't have anything to do with debconf: "Debconf was
never meant for such things". Debconf is meant for initial
configuration of packages for which there is no reasonable "default"
configuration. For example, the ssh package includes a client, and a
server, and asks "Do you want to run the sshd server". It is
probably, at best, borderline acceptable to ask "In what formats do
you want to make the mailinglists available".
> c) create a single packge that does conversation into the desired format
> on user request (mbox->maildir, mbox->html) over all installed archive
> packages.
This is the right idea. Provide a package which includes the "source"
format (mbox, say). Other packages can do maildir or html conversion
(if not, then you can make them:). Just provide
/usr/share/doc/mailinglists/examples/ scripts or whatever which
implement those other packages in the context of mailinglists. Maybe
one program edits the apache configuration to make /mailinglists a web
alias for /u/s/mailinglists/, and another finds the start of a given
thread.
> A searchable version is what came in my mind while building up my
> archive, locally for me works a postgresql database with a full text
> index and some data structure for finding threads. But as a package?
> Hmm.. would be interesting and quite useful, but depends on the fact
> that a user needs a postgresql (or a differnet) database.
Right again. No reason for mailinglists to depend on a relational SQL
DB. (Since I can do perfectly good search with zgrep). If you want
to allow users to import them into SQL, I recommend providing a
utility in /u/s/d/mailinglists/examples/.
Cheers,
Justin
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