Re: Thank you Tony (was: XSL-list doomed)

Paul Tchistopolskii wrote:
> How can I be 'fair' or 'unfair' with technical issues ?
> 
> The archive of XSL-list is broken since summer
> and nobody bothers to fix it. Is it 'fair' or 'not fair' - 
> I don't understand. It is the *fact*.

There are 2 popular pieces of software that people use to provide mailing
list interfaces on web sites: Hypermail and MHonArc. Both work the same
way -- for each message a separate HTML file is created. I have used both
of these systems and they both reach a point of critical mass on a large
archive where you cannot run them at all, unless you have an infinite
amount of memory. They are also extremely wasteful, tripling the size of
an archive in terms of disk space, and using up thousands and thousands of
inodes which makes doing even a directory listing a major chore. Add on
top of this the nearly impossible task of adding a search engine, which
cannot afford to simply grep through all those files every time someone
wants to search but instead needs to build and use an optimized index...
it becomes a huge pain to set up and maintain, and a monumental resource
hog. You have to ask, "is it really worth it, just so people can see
pretty HTML in their web browsers?"

I have had to discontinue web-based archiving for a dozen lists because
they are too big to be worth the effort, using the software that is out
there. The only solution for large lists right now is to break up the
archive into completely separate sections by month. It's still wasteful of
resources, and then you also have to write a custom set of scripts to
handle the automatic archiving under such a system. Rebuilding a large
archive can also take *days* of one's time. It is not so simple as you
would like to believe.

It was this archive nightmare experience shared by me and a friend that
led to the formation of the EyeBrowse project at
http://eyebrowse.tigris.org/ ... it still has yet to reach a point of
stability but it is getting there.

In the mean time, I suggest that if nothing else, providing access to the
raw mbox files is better than nothing.. we could set up our own archives
or just download the files and search through them with our own tools.

   - Mike
____________________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer at         My XML/XSL resources:
webb.net in Denver, Colorado, USA           http://www.skew.org/xml/




 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list