mhonarc-users

persistently linking to within archives

1999-11-19 13:03:02
I want to allow persistent links to specific messages within archives
that may be unpredictably rebuilt.  There was a useful discussion about
this some time ago:

<http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/mhonarc/1998-07/threads.html#00088>

To my knowledge, little has come of it.

Fortunately, MHonArc's outrageously useful Digest::MD5 support provides
the unique handles required to make an abstraction layer pretty easy. 
I'm writing to inquire as to whether this has perhaps been done already,
or if I've left anything important out.

I was planning to postprocess the OUTDIR directories, mapping current
message-IDs to filenames, and adding something along these lines to the
message files:

    Want to create a <a
    href="http://mysite.net/getdoc.cgi?$MESSAGE-ID>permanent
    link</a> to this message?

I was also planning to use DBI/MySQL, but Earl points out in the above
thread that DB_file could be just as good, and a whole lot easier to
possibly incorporate into the mhonarc codebase.

If the idea is basically sound, I'd like to request:

a)  a resource specifying the host of the made-up message-ids
    as something less alarming than "@NO-ID-FOUND.mhonarc.org"
    (patching mhamain.pl seems undesirable)

b)  a resource variable to reference the message-ID within the
    message layout.

c)  feedback.

thanks!

  -nat


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