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

[Manuel Vacelet]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org> wrote:
> 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.

Forge code is available into Codendi public repository:
http://codendi.org/svn/viewvc.php/dev/branches/1640_forumml_4.0/plugins/forumml/?roottype=svn&root=codendi

Mailman patch:
http://codendi.org/svn/viewvc.php/dev/branches/1640_forumml_4.0/rpm/SOURCES/mailman-2.1.9-forumml.patch?roottype=svn&revision=14602&root=codendi&view=markup

And 2 screenshot in action:
http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/7540/forummlhtmlmail.png
http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/7061/forummlsimplethread.png

> 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.

Great, it should avoid the mailman patch.

> 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.

First of all, all our work is GPLv2.
There is not really well defined interface to store the message into
the forge. The archiver itself is very simple it takes an email with
"mbox" format, splits it, gather "forge" informations (mainly
project/list info) and store the email into a DB. Actually, it's
closer to a DB archiver than a forge archiver

As of today, I'm not sure to see what a "Generic Forge Archiver" would
looks like.

BTW code is not as clean as it should be, the DB schema needs
refactoring, but, at least, it works!

Manuel