[Pkg-mailman-hackers] [Codendi-devel] [Mailman-Developers] Mailman/Forge Integration

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 15, 2010, at 7:38 AM, Manuel VACELET wrote:

> At STMicroelectronics, we developed a web front-end to display mailman lists archives into the forge (Codendi). The development is pretty simple as it's just a new archiver for mailman that stores the mails into the forge database and a dedicated development to display mails with a gmail like interface tightly integrated with the forge (authentication, membership, etc).
> 
> The biggest development was to support the different kind of mime messages in order to display HTML emails properly (and safely thanks to HTMLPurifier).
> 
> We have made a small patch to mailman in order to have 2 archiver in the same time (the default one + the forge one).
> 
> As of today, the branch is not yet publicly available, I will see how we can share the code through Codendi repository.

Yes, I'd really like to see that work, it sounds quite interesting.  A couple of thoughts:

Mailman 3 has interfaces that allow for any number of archivers to be connected to a mailing list.  I have implementations for Pipermail and mail-archive.com.  The interface is pretty straightforward so hopefully it would be easy to add one for a forge archiver.

How tightly integrated with the forge database is your archiver?  Does it have well defined interfaces that could be plugged into a standalone Mailman installation?  IOW, how possible would it be to take your work and develop a standalone archiver?   If you release your work under a free software license (technically, GPL-compatible) then the Mailman community might be interested in helping to develop it further.  I think there's been a serious dearth of progress on open source archivers over the last several years.

-Barry