We are at a point where most everything has been merged and people are
starting to play with the new version. (I even got Craig Summerhill's and
Roy Tennant's suggestions in.) There are still some patches I need review
again for possible integration but at this point it's time to think about
what's next. The following is list of lists of ramblings. Feel free to
jump in on any one or all. ;)
Comparisons:
It was suggested earlier that we look at the features that mhonarc has
that hypermail might need. This is what I see as *real* differences.
- Support variant mail folders types. Hypermail supports only UUCP
style mailboxes. We could create an archive of converters somewhere
so people could grab them when they need them.
- With the MIME model, you can extend MHonArc to handle content-types
that it does not support by default. The granularity is better.
- Page customization. A real difference. Need to be able to give the user
complete control on how pages are formatted, including the use of frames.
- Windows/NT (and all the other platforms that perl runs on).
A Windows/NT port has been asked for a few times in the last month.
(When suggested to try mhonarc two said they had and it was too slow.)
There are many others that are implementation based but don't seem to be
functionality based. FWIW.
Important Things:
- Add locking to the archive so there is no race conditions and only a
single message is processed at a time. Subsequent arriving messages
would queue waiting completion... At the present time it is possible
to have two, three, ... hypermail processes trying to update the same
archive. This can cause real problems on a high traffic list that needs
near-real time updating.
- Add URL sanity validation routines to assure that only valid
URLs are generated. This will also look for other links besides
just listed URLs. (convert ftp.some.site:/pub/filename into a URL)
- MIME support and all it implies (_real_ close but still a little to go)
o Need to have the enclosure filenames tied somehow to the file it is
linked from for removal and overwrite updates.
o Have the MIME decoding ignore multipart/alternative and have it use
a configured default (such as plain/text) as the primary method
(dropping the redundant alternatives on the floor).
=================
Archiving Issues:
- Additional utilities to support archiviving with hypermail
o Archiving to mailbox and hypermail archive
o Remove a message from an archive
o Read an existing Hypermail archive and convert it to a new format
o Built in or snap in search interface
- Add the ability for a site to add add and preform filtering of the
incoming articles before they are archived.
- Ability to save files with suffix ".htm" or ".html"
- Add the ability to have hypermail store an incoming message in to
a Unix mailbox archive as well as generating the new HTML page.
- Expire old articles, honor "X-Expires" or "Expires"
- Strip out duplicate message ID's
- Don't ignore umask - HM_UMASK variable?
- The ability to cap the archive to X most recent messages
Index Issues:
- Generate different types of Index pages. Author, Subject, Thread, Date
are currently support. What other index types might be wanted ? Message
number ? Via message ID ?
- Add ability to breakup index pages into multiple pages
o Limit by # of messages and by hour/day/week/month/size
o Make subfolders?
- Add links to message attachments on index pages ?
Date Issues:
- Date Normalization ?
- Check for dates not containing ":"
- Check for date values that are not padded with a "0" on the left
- Date sorting needs to be more robust
o Allow for very old years
o Allow for years > current year
o Timezone conversion
- Archiving by date sent versus date received ?
General:
- Add complete capabilites to format HTML including the ability to
provide FRAMES support ?
- Systems portability:
o Testing on other Unix platforms
o Porting to Windows/NT
- Automated regression test suite.
- Need to create a library of hypermail functions so that other utilities
can be generated without making things real ugly. (i.e. removal, other
indexing.)
- Verify Year 2000 compliance
- A better icon for hypermail!
Parsing and Code:
- Should recognize and parse indented HTML tags
- In parsing header fields, check for extra spaces, tabs, etc.
- Check for zero-length headers
- Make sure "sort by..." groups all messages in same thread
- Add sort by "in reply to" as well
- No fixed string limits
- No fixed message limits
- Performance enhancements for dealing with large archives. Profiling the
code to see where the time is being spent and speed it up.
Documentation:
- Real documentation on Archiving the Hypermail way.
- Description document as to how things work internally.
These are on the table as to what should be done next. The Important ones
might be a starting point... ;) Comments ? What is it that you need the
most ?
--
Kent Landfield Phone: 1-817-545-2502
Email: kent_at_landfield.com http://www.landfield.com/
Email: kent_at_nfr.net http://www.nfr.net/
Please send comp.sources.misc related mail to kent_at_landfield.com
Search the Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/
Received on Mon 08 Jun 1998 08:35:49 PM GMT