Mailman and MHonArc
Documentation for open source projects can sometimes be very finicky. Witness the missing HOWTO for integrating MHonArc, a mail-to-HTML converter, with Mailman, a mailing list manager, in the answer to the FAQ.
Since I’m migrating the work mailing lists from the no-longer-being developed majordomo (which occassionally hangs sendmail), and since I’ve found Mailman’s pipermail to be grossly disk space inefficient, I have to get these two pieces working together. After that, I can point the namazu search engine at the archives, which will hopefully be nicer than htDig.
Fortunately, someone on the MHonArc mailing list kindly posted the configuration changes for Mailman to use MHonArc as the external archiver:
PUBLIC_ARCHIVE_URL = ‘/testarc’
PRIVATE_ARCHIVE_URL = ‘/testarc’
PUBLIC_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER = ‘/usr/bin/mhonarc -add -outdir /var/www/html/www.cjc.org/testarc/%(listname)s > /dev/null’
PRIVATE_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER = ‘/usr/bin/mhonarc -add -outdir /var/www/html/www.cjc.org/testarc/%(listname)s > /dev/null’
This works. Some notes:
1. The outdir/%(listname) has to be created, and owned by mailman. That’s relatively obvious, but I have to set up a mechanism to do this automatically on list creation.
2. I’m not sure what the trailing “s” after %(listname) does. Should look at Mailman docs more carefully.
3. Pipermail output directories can be removed. Mail is still appended to a big mbox file in the usual place, which is good.
4. I should set the outdir back to the old mail.randomwalk.com/lists location. Private lists can be protected using .htaccess files, as they were under majordomo and hypermail.
5. Transfer to MHonArc will probably be done as I’m upgrading to cyrus-imapd-2.0.17 tonight.