From: Crispen, Bob (Robert.Crispen@HSV.Boeing.com)
Date: Tue Dec 12 2000 - 13:40:44 CST
I've been thinking about something. As a group of people
collaborate using a majordomo (etc.) list, they sometimes
type plain text messages, but a number of the groups I've
got here on my server also share documents through the
list.
The documents are part of the group's history, and are
often the most important products of the group and the
things a new person to the list needs to know about first.
The trouble is, if the group has been talkative, it takes quite
a while to weed through all the messages using the existing
indexes to find the ones with attachments.
So I think it might be useful to have a page that has links
only to messages with attachments. It's important to link
the messages, and not just the attachments, because the
metadata for the document often exists nowhere but in
the message that accompanies the document.
I'd thought about using the existing indexes and marking
the subject lines of messages that have attachments, but
in the end I decided an attachments index would be easier
to use. And too, the proper way to mark attachments if
we just annotated subject lines on existing indexes is with
an icon, but one of the nicest things about hypermail is
that in some installations there's only one file for admins
to manage: the hypermail executable. Adding an icon
would effectively double the number of files those admins
have to manage.
I'm at work on a change to print.c (and a small change
to hypermail.c) that will add an index page for messages
that have attachments.
I'm also going to do it the right way and put any strings
in lang.h. But I'll tell you what -- that's nasty. I'm gonna
stick some empty strings in the array at appropriate places
so the next person along doesn't have this aggravation. Of
course, if that turns out to be impossible, I imagine I'll
find it out pretty quickly ;-)
I started with the hypermail-2b30.tar.gz distribution. Alas,
cvs can't get through the firewall here, so I'll test all my
changes here, then send it to my house where I can
use WinCvs to check out the originals, substitute my
changes, do a little sanity-testing, and check it back in.
First off, am I using the right codebase, or should I start
with something else? Second, do I have permission to
check stuff in once I confirm it works, or should I send
it to someone?
Also, if you could let me know what you have in mind for
release milestones, I'll do my best to get it in, or else
put it off until after the release if one's imminent.
But first things first. If I'm the only one who thinks an
index of messages with attachments might be useful, I'll
just keep the changes here and save everybody the trouble.
Bob Crispen
bob.crispen@boeing.com