Re: Ideas

> From: Kent Landfield <kent_at_landfield.com>
> Date: Mon, 4 May 1998 16:41:16 -0500 (CDT)
>
> # Is there a hypermail archive for this list? (And if so, where?)
>
> http://www.landfield.com/hypermail/

Thanks! I just read through the "Ideas" thread on the list archive, and I'd like to comment on a couple of things I saw there.

First, regarding this idea:

• Do away with one-file-per-message - I have lists with dozens of messages per day and it would just be nicer to pluck a single message out of a file and format it into HTML on the fly. All it would take is the maintenance of a companion file which listed starting byte positions for each message, and optionally some extra info for each message to speed up message threading and menus, etc.

I don't know if I understand this right: Does this suggest replacing 0000.html, 0001.html, etc with a single file? If so, then I think that might be a mistake. It would require a CGI program to extract each page on demand and turn it into HTML. Thus, the extraction/HTML conversion would be done each time each message is read, instead of the current way which is just once per message. It would mean a much higher system load for busy archives.

Okay, second comment now. This is regarding the suggestion someone offered in a reply about putting all of the attachments for all the messages in a "bins" directory.

(First, I suggest that such a directory be called something like "attachments" instead of "bins" -- it's just more semantically accurate. But that's not my reason for writing this...)

I suggest that there should be a subdirectory for *each* message that has attachments. The subdirectory would contain all the attachments for that message. For example, if message 0042 had two attachments, "schedule.xls" and "foobar.doc", then there would perhaps be the following direcotries:

   () denotes a directory, <> denotes a file

       (attachments)
            |
            |
            +--> (0042) ...
                   |
                   |
                   +--> <schedule.xls>  <foobar.doc>

This way, all of the attachments for a particular message are grouped together, which makes them easy to find, and easy to delete when one wishes to remove message 0042 from the archive. It also lets the attachments keep their original file names, if they such is given in their mime headers (and it usually is).

Thanks for reading,
--Byron Darrah Received on Tue 05 May 1998 01:04:05 AM GMT