Re: mailing list archiver chewing patches

Dimitri Fontaine wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> > That is assuming that the MUA gives you the option of specifying the
> > attachment MIME type. Many (including mine) do not. It would mean an extra
> > step - I'd have to gzip each patch or something like that. That would be
> > unfortunate,as well as imposing extra effort, because it would make the
> > patch not display inline in many MUAs (again, like mine).
>
> Bad MUA, change MUA, or what they say…
>
> More seriously though, it's not the first time we're having some
> difficulties with the MHonArc setup, and I think it's also related to
> the poor thread following on the archives website at month boundaries.

Absolutely. The month boundary problem boils down to the fact that
Mhonarc does not scale very well, so we can't have mboxes that are too
large. This is why most people split their archives per month, and then
each month is published as an independent Mhonarc output archive. It's
a horrid solution.

> Are our indexing and searches provided by MHonArc or maintained by the
> community?

Searches are completely external to mhonarc.

> How helpful considering alternatives, such as AOX (which runs
> atop PostgreSQL and would offer anonymous IMAP facility over the
> archives) would be?
>
> Of course it'll boil down to who's maintaining the current solution and
> how much time is allocated to this, the solution research and migration
> would have to fit in there I suppose. Same as pgfoundry. But still,
> should we talk about it?

There's some talk about writing our own archiving system,
database-backed. There have been a few false starts but no concrete
result so far. We need a lot more manpower invested in this problem.
If there's interest, let's talk about it.

My daugher was born yesterday and I'm having a bit of a calm before the
storm because she's not coming home until Tuesday or so (at this time of
the day, that is, because I have to take care of the other daughter).
I'll be probably away for (at least) a week when she does; and I'll
probably have somewhat of a shortage of spare time after that.

--
Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.