April 17, 2003
The ugliest got a face-lift.
As much as my fingers were itching to stop trying and write one of my own, I succeeded in installing a quite buggy (still) version of a Python rewrite of the ugliest mailing list archive in the world. Enjoy.Lessons learnt:
- It is fairly easy to mess up signature dependencies of required modules if there's no clear indication what version of Python is exactly required.
- Everybody seems to invent his own templating tricks when using Python.
- ezmlm might be powerfull and trouble-free stuff, but it is really hard to find a decent web mail archiver which runs directly on the Maildir archives. Too hard.
- I'm normally not used to work with open source code with no community around it. It is scary to work with code coming out of some obscure SF CVS module, with a mailing list archive of only 15 messages over 1.5 years. Commit messages, that is: I found no trace of real, human communication. :-)