Re: Automatic linking to a mhonarc archive

[Alan Burlison <Alan.Burlison@Sun.COM>]

Earl Hood wrote:

> The location of a message on an index page is not known until MHonArc
> is writing/editing the HTML pages.  A solution would require two
> step process:
> 
> 1. Use the $mhonarc::CBMessageHeadRead callback to store the index
>    and message-id of new messages (probably in some kind of hash).
> 
> 2. At the end of archive processing, go through your hash and
>    resolve which index page each new message is listed under.  This
>    could be done by calling the mhonarc::replace_li_var() function
>    directly:
> 
>     $idx_file = mhonarc::replace_li_var('$IDXFNAME$', $index);
> 
>    Where $index is the message index you save in
>    $mhonarc::CBMessageHeadRead.  Now you should have the
>    index filename and the message-id (which you grabbed in
>    $mhonarc::CBMessageHeadRead) to support your linking.

Excellent - that sounds like exactly what I want.

> Step (2) would require you write your own front-end to MHonArc so
> you can do step (2) after an archive has been processed.  Example:
> 
>     require 'mhamain.pl' || die qq/ERROR: Unable to require "mhamain.pl"\n/;
>     mhonarc::initialize();
>     if (mhonarc::process_input()) {
>       # ... Your post processing code here ...
>       exit(0);
> 
>     } else {
>       # Some error occurred
>       exit($mhonarc::CODE);
>     }
> 
> The alternative is to put your stuff in the $mhonarc::CBDbSave callback
> since the database file is written after all pages have been written.

I was intending to write my own front-end ayway, as I will probably drive
this processing directly from a '|' entry in /etc/aliases.

> Note, it is technically possibly for a message's listing on an index
> page to move to another page when MULTIPG is active.  This can happen
> if an older message happens to be passed into mhonarc before a newer
> message.  Also, the probability of message listing moving increases if
> REVERSE is active since newer messages will be listed *before* older
> messages.  This could cause an older message listing to be "pushed"
> to the next index page when new messages are processed.
> 
> Therefore, to be extra careful, you may have to traverse all messages
> in the archive each time during archive updates instead of just
> handling new messages.

Ecch, I hadn't thought of that.  I'm not using REVERSE, so the problem
shouldn't be so severe, but thanks for the tip anyway.

Something else I have done is to tweak the text/plain filter so that rather
than quoting messages by surrounding them in <i>...</i> tags, it uses <span
class="quote">...</span>, so I can turn them a purty color using a
stylesheet.  I've finished hacking my 400-line .mrc file, and it all looks
*very* pretty - now for the final programmatic glue :-)

Once again, thanks for all your help.  Once I have this all working, I'll
send in the bits if anyone is interested!

-- 
Alan Burlison
--
$ head -1 /dev/bollocks
interactively synthesize seamless extensible portals

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