Re: Mailing list archive

["William A. Carrel" <william.a@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In article <Xns94298F4B34A39justinshiningsilence@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 "Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> http://www.shiningsilence.com/mailarchive/
> 
> I put together an archive of these lists (except test), updated hourly. 
> It's for me to link to when doing log entries, and cause it's sometimes
> easier to browse threads after they finish.  So far, it seems to be
> working well. 

It would make more sense to implement a simple nntp -> http gateway.  
That is unless news.dragonflybsd.org is expiring articles so fast that 
it isn't an option.  (I don't believe this is the case.)  

One of the inherent advantages of NNTP is that it provides that archival 
function (and usually search) just through the necessity of how it 
works.  Not to mention the ability for administrators to cancel spam and 
other contentless junk out of people's views (and hence the archive) 
with no magic incantations.  You really can't do that with a mailing 
list without a bunch of upfront work which as of yet hasn't been done.

There are a variety of tools available for gating nntp to http.  Some 
are, of course, more attractive to look at than others.  
"news.gmane.org" uses the "News-Portal" program.  For efficiency, such a 
service should probably be hosted fairly close to the NNTP server.  (As 
an aside, despite News-Portal being PHP-based it doesn't use the 
built-in PHP NNTP toolset which (last I checked) uses libraries from 
UW's pine, which doesn't exactly have a stellar security track record.)

In any case, such a service should likely be linked from the 
www.dragonflybsd.org web pages in the forum section.
-- 
William A. Carrel