Hi all!
I think we can all agree that the current web archive over at
lists.suckless.org isn't all that great;
Author names get mangled, the navigation is terrible, some messages
are duplicated, some missing.
That's why I've started looking into #3 of the 'Project Ideas' page
(
https://suckless.org/project_ideas/) -- "Write a decent mailing list
Web archive system".
I see lots of potential to build something better than hypermail:
- We could take text encodings more seriously.
hypermail just copies the 'charset' notice over into the HTML
file, which doesn't work when listing multiple messages.
- We could use maildir instead of the really brittle mbox format for mailboxes.
This might also help avoid message dropping/duplication, but I'm not
sure about that.
- We could try a different navigation scheme. Perhaps flat threads
instead of a hierarchy?
I don't really know how people here feel about this, but it's
mentioned on the 'Project Ideas' page
and I'm in favour of it. Navigating message trees is really confusing.
- Bonus: We can ignore CGI, uuencode, HTML mail and all that cruft.
Is there currently any interest in such a project here?
So far, I've gone ahead and implemented a sort of proof-of-concept (at
https://www.github.com/tomolt/mailarchiver).
Of course I can't guarantee that this will go anywhere, as I only have
limited time and patience myself, but I can give it a try.
Cheers,
Thomas Oltmann
Received on Wed Aug 10 2022 - 21:29:43 CEST