Re: MHonArc archives to be retired?

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/15/18 3:45 PM, Russ Housley wrote:

Miles:

And, in any case, RFC6778 seems to be a rather old document, Informational only, and the product of a single individual.

That does not accurately represent the situation.  Robert Sparks held the pen to capture the requirements, and then the document went through an IETF-wide Last Call and IESG review.

The requirements captured in RFC 6778 have guided the Tools Team throughout the development of the mail archive tool.  As you have already seen on this thread, improvements are being worked right now.

Ok.  Fair enough.  (Particularly when you add RFC 7842).

But... then I'll point back to the observation that the only reference to deduplication is in the intro - "

The current archive mechanism could also be made more efficient.  The current practices involve duplicate stores (for the web and ftp
interfaces), which impact storage and replication and are subject to inconsistency."  
While there is an extensive section on redundancy.

And the requirement for keeping the MhonArc links working.

One might argue that maintaining the MhonArc archive serves both requirements, while removing it requires new mechanisms.

Leading to a follow-up question:  What was the design review process?  Was there one?  
RFC6778 & RFC 7842 may be fully coordinated & reviewed requirements documents.  Has the tools team produced a similarly 
detailed and coordinated design document?  

Now, this is a bit after the fact, so patently unfair to raise now - but somehow, Mailman + a custom archiving system seems like a rather
convoluted approach to improving the IETF's list environment.  If it were me, I would have replaced mailman with Sympa, years ago - fully integrated 
MhonArc comes with it - along with a simple interface for removing messages without changing lots of files.  Seems like an awful lot of
folks have gone to an awful lot of work, buildings something custom - when off-the-shelf, open source solutions were available.

Miles

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra