Dearest mail manipulating macaques and perambulating python
prestidigitators,
I have been blessed by the grace of Google and so am working full-time
on improving Mailman's web UI:
http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Summer+of+Code
In order to provide interfaces to archives, I believe I must perform
some intermediary manipulation; my goal is to get the information
contained within the .mbox files mailman generates into ElementTrees and
other objects so as to represent them via HTML/RSS/Atom/etc.
This is slightly out of scope for the web-UI project, as it is mostly
about data model rather than actual user interface.
In the interest of not reinventing the wheel, I'm looking for existing
python (or other!) code that does the things I need. I'm also putting
out a call for anybody who likes this sort of thing to help me out (see
below).
Here's where I'm at, grouped functionally:
* Need to convert rfc8222 to xml/html
I haven't found anything substantial via searching. My next step is to
go spelunking in MailManager code and other python-webmail packages. If
anyone knows good trees in this forest, please clue me in.
* Want to provide feeds (rss/atom/YourMommasSyntaxFormat)
Right this second I'm planning on using pyfeed [1]; is there anything
else I should consider?
[1] http://home.blarg.net/~steveha/pyfeed.html
* mbox thread indexing on messages
I plan on using [2] to generate mbox thread indexes for rapid navigation
of lists. Any suggestions for more robust variants would be welcome;
feedback on how to handle threading for message-id-less messages would
also be welcome.
[2] http://benno.id.au/code/archiver/jwzthreading.py
* full-text indexing
pylucene seems to be the obvious choice; anything else I should
consider? Anyone know of good pylucene/web UI glue code out there?
(eg. something that leverages knowledge of the index to provide
suggested keywords/tag cloud and/or tab-completion)
As to help, I am first and foremost interested in someone willing to
write renderers as above and check it in to my branch.
I am also, however, interested in any advice, suggestions,
dear-gods-whatever-you-do-don't-do-x comments, critiques of what is
already checked in (zero python code, much html so far), pats on the
back or other goodies (snailmail address available on request ;)
I do ask that you send anything not related to my above question
directly to me, bypassing the list; I'd also humbly ask you to read the
wiki page before telling me I should do XYZ; I may already be doing it.
I'm not actually subbed to python-list because I lack the stamina, so
please cc: me on any follow ups.
Thank you for your generous assistance,
~ethan fremen
