From: Bjarni R. Einarsson (bre@netverjar.is)
Date: Thu Nov 04 1999 - 17:08:34 CST
Hi,
First - Hypermail is an excellent program. I really love the MIME
support.
I'm in the process of getting a few mailing lists I've been running for
the past couple of years properly archived online, and I'm currently
using Hypermail 2b25, with a few patches of my own.
Patches:
The first patch is an Icelandic language translation. I deliberately only
translated the HTML strings, since I don't believe in making life difficult
for sysadmins (switching languages all the time and dealing with crappy
translations doesn't help). The relavant patch for lang.h is attached to
this message.
Patch number two adds a "stripsubject" feature to hypermail, which
makes it remove all occurances of a given word from the subject line,
which is really useful for un-cluttering the subjects of some mailing
lists (my lists all have their subjects prefixed with [listname]: -
which is quite redundant in an archive). This was a trivial feature to
implement, the patch for it is also attached to this message.
Patch number three (and ex-bug-report) implemented Jose Kahan's
HTML-detection-disabling, which I read about just now and thouroghly
approve of. :-) Without it some inlined HTML was causing the lower
half of some of my messages to go missing because of the </HTML> (with
some browsers). As you may guess from my signature, I'm glad he
decided not to disable the signature detecting code. :-)
Bug reports:
I noticed a minor bug in the hypermail "usage" message, where the -M
flag was printed out as one of the supported languages. This patch is
corrected by my "stripsubject" patch.
The second bug I found had to do with MIME parsing, and I didn't have
the energy to wade in and try and fix it.
If a header contains something like this:
Content-Type: Multipart/Mixed;
boundary="Boundary-=_nWlrBbmQBhCDarzOwKkYHIDdqSCD"
and if the body of the message is just plain text that doesn't
actually have any MIME parts (the boundary string never occurs),
then hypermail will search the rest of the file for the boundary,
and since it probably won't find it (the boundary string is usually
pretty random) it will conclude that there are no more messages. If
on the other hand it found the same boundary string further down,
something even stranger would probably occur. :-)
This is rather ungraceful behavior, especially considering that
manufacturing messages like that is very easy to do, so not just
buggy mailers but also pranksters could cause mailing list
archivers alot of headaches with this.
I'd wager that some sort of sanity check in the code that searches
for the first boundary string would solve this problem.
There. I'm done, for now.
Hypermail is cool - you guys are doing a great job, and most of the
code (except for the huge parsing loop) was pretty easy to follow.
Aside from the above issues, hypermail has been doing an excellent job
with what I've thrown at it so far.
Since I'm not in a rush to put my archives online, and I'm regenerating
archives containing thousands of messages many times a day already,
would I be doing you guys a favour if I ran daily snapshots instead of
2b25?
-- Bjarni R. Einarsson PGP: 02764305, B7A3AB89 bre@netverjar.is -><- http://www.mmedia.is/~bre/ Netverjar gegn ruslpósti: http://www.netverjar.is/baratta/ruslpostur/