On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 09:29:43PM +0200, Thomas Oltmann wrote:
> 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
>
Hi,
In general the points look good to me. I haven't looked at the code.
I think we can ignore some cruft. HTML mail should be avoided, atleast on suckless.
Supporting nested threads are a must though (imho).
Right now there are multiple views (by date, thread etc). I'd like to keep
these options.
For parsing mail, maybe mblaze or parts of that code can be reused too:
https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze
Thanks,
--
Kind regards,
Hiltjo
Received on Thu Aug 11 2022 - 01:06:50 CEST