From: jose.kahan@w3.org
Date: Wed Sep 01 1999 - 08:28:23 CDT
A belated comment...
In our previous episode, Daniel Stenberg said:
>
> > It would be nice, if hypermail could somehow manage to link to thread
> > messages in different month. Okay, seems hard to do, but it would
> > definately be a very useful feature to follow threads, which run over
> > more than one month.
>
> Splitting the archive per month really cripples the concept of threading,
> yes. But to perfectly enable threading across different directories/
> mailboxes, you'd need a single large database with info about the mails,
> threads and indexes. That brings us back to the idea where hypermail should
> store information about the current mbox, indexes, mails etc in a file to
> speed up the operations...
Mhonarc uses a big database and it should be possible to do cross-threading
with it. However, if ever Mhonarc crashes while writing to the dbase, you'll
need to rebuild it. If hypermail crashes, you need to rebuild the current
month.
Let me toss some ideas about using a dbase...
Notwithstanding, the use of a dbase is quite interesting, not only for
cross-linking among different months, different lists, but also to have
permanent URLs, which are separated from the file system. The idea
is that your messages URLs include a list name, message id, and you go
thru a cgi-script + dbase to find the static file that correspond to the
message. This is nice in that you can move your static files around without
breaking any links. As sometimes you need to have buffered read/write
access to the base (e.g., cgi-script reading a message at the same time
that a new message arrives), a SQL base, like mysql, is more appropriate
than a dbm one.
-Jose