At 11:03 2002-01-17 -0500, Tom Oehser did say:
>I'll post some questions to find if there are any tools or experience with
>importing the mailing list archives and /or feeding the current traffic
>into it with some best guess topics and linkage.
A sedmail 'prog' alias is probably your easiest route to introducing the
new list messages to a program which can then feed them to the wiki database:
tomswiki: "|/path_to_some_app_that_feeds_message_into_db and args"
This address would then be subscribed to the tomsrtbt list (obviously
manually so that it doesn't archive off any administrative confirmation and
welcome message). The script itself could use the Subject to determine
which sub-page of your wiki to post the content to. I'm not at all
familiar with "wiki" to be able to say what is necessary to post to it, but
the above would very easily pipe the message into a script allowing you to
manipulate it as necessary (possibly even invoking lynx to post the data if
you).
You could utilize procmail in a similar fashion, and for existing messages,
if they're in an "mailbox" format somewhere (on your server perhaps),
formail (which is a supplementary tool that is part of procmail) can split
them up and pass them individually to a program (including procmail, if not
directly to the script you might use in the alias above):
formail -n 1 -s procmail -m someprocmailscript.rc < old_list_mailbox
The -n 1 option would keep formail running only one child process, rather
than attempting to run multiple concurrent ones (which would potentially
cause the messages to be introduced into the wiki in a different order -
say because a larger message took longer to be inserted).
It should go without saying that if the script introduces data into the
input mailbox (it _shouldn't_ for what you want to do), that the input
mailbox should be a static copy of the list mailbox, not the live mailbox
or a symlink to same.
FTR, I would personally expect to continue to use the mailing list for
questions and feedback - a web interface often has a way of getting in the
way of effective communication, and I'm comfortable with the search
facilities afforded by my email client.
---
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA 94912-2395
