Re: mail list traffic

Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> When I saw the manitou-mail.org stuff some days ago I was curious
> -- how feasible would it be to host our web archives using a
> database of some sort, instead of the current mbox-based Mhonarc
> installation we use, which is so full of problems and limitations?

One problem I've noticed on archives.postgresql.org is that threads
don't cross month boundaries.
For example if I'm looking at:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2008-09/msg01003.php ,
according to the webpage, this message doesn't has references nor
follow-up.
But actually it's a reply to this one:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2008-05/msg00404.php
and it has this followup:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2008-10/msg00466.php

In fact it looks like all threads are cut at the end of each month, and
that everything is partitioned by month anyway. I guess it's because
mhonarc operates only on the current month by design, which makes sense
if its storage doesn't scale.

What manitou-mail could provide here is the database structure and the
scripts that feed the live archive, and it wouldn't have these
limitations of mhonarc. As a bonus, it opens up the data to SQL
interfaces, so you can think of querying messages using complex
criteria, or producing statistics, reports...
But it doesn't provide the generation of webpages that is after all the
whole point of this web archive. I assume that the idea is to generate
everything in static pages like mhonarc seems to do rather than
live-querying the database. Anyway that HTML generation part would need
to be recreated or changed to deal with a different "data source" and a
different partitioning of data, if it's modular enough that such a
thing is possible. How hard would that be? Personally I have no idea,
anyone who is familiar with that code?

Best regards,
--
Daniel
PostgreSQL-powered mail user agent and storage:
http://www.manitou-mail.org