launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Oct 25, 2011, at 05:23 PM, curtis Hovey wrote:

>I fixed some critical bugs in the mailing list archives earlier this
>year. I also saw an opportunity to fix several UI bugs since I was
>working in the MHonArc templates. As I was testing the changes it
>occurred to me that In the a matter of hours, I could change the
>templates to generate JSON instead of HTML. I dismissed the idea as
>outlandish, but after 6 months, I think it may not be crazy.
>
>We have several problems that I think can be solved by replacing the
>MHonArc-generated HTML pages with data that the Launchpad webapp could
>understand.
>
>  * The UI does not match the Website.
>  * The messages are missing Lp linkification to bugs and users.
>  * The reverse index pages causes hour-long delays adding new messages.
>  * ISD desupported our Apache mod to authenticate team members; we
>    cannot view private lists.
>
>We might be able to change lp-mhonarc-common.mrc to generate JSON and
>treat the lists.launchpad.net as JSON file server.
>
>  * Only the Launchpad webapp could request files from the server http
>    server.
>  * The index and message files would be tuned to easy interpretation by Lp.
>  * Team pages would get views to show messages and message listings.
>  * Lp would update the JSON data with links to users and bugs.
>  * Pages could be rendered using TALES or moustache temples with the
>    full Lp UI
>  * While JSON + moustache can be done on the client, the JSON must
>    still pass though Lp to be authorised, sanitised, and linkified.
>  * Lp would read the index JSON and do the reversing itself, and use a
>    cached version when possible
>  * Messages could be shown as a thread.
>  * The pages would be indexable by google to appear in search.

This is a very neat idea.  I'd suggest structuring the changes in such a way
that upstream might accept them, but tbh, I'm not sure MHonArc is still a
healthy project.  The last release was apparently in January 2011, and the
ViewCVS for the project is a dead link.  It's hard to tell from the CVS
snapshot what, if anything, has been happening lately.

>Doing this might be easier than fixing private lists.
>
>We can replace MHonArc in the future with another system that serves JSON.

So, let's fix Pipermail to have stable urls and output JSON.  That Perl stuff
will rot your brain.  :)

-Barry

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