On Wednesday, July 23, 2003, at 03:40 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> Am Mittwoch, 23.07.03 um 21:36 Uhr schrieb Jimmie Houchin:
>
>> ...
>> I very much like what the BFAV is enabling in the community. But I 
>> know many people are busy (who isn't) and many get bogged down in the 
>> number of messages. A few busy bees can generate many, many BFAV 
>> messages. Which can make the list appear more overwhelming than it 
>> truly is.
>>
>> I really like the seperate list idea the best for either generated 
>> type emails and/or possibly non-discussion/informational type of 
>> messages.
>>   (does not exclude custom header)
>> It addresses other areas also, web interfaces, archives, etc.
>> But,... not without community agreement. :)
>
> Well, the current setup is only temporary, I was told by Those In The 
> Know ;-)

Right. :-)  I think most of us agree that the current traffic on 
squeak-dev from harvesting/BFAV is rather heavy and that it shouldn't 
be a permanent solution.  It might be good to set a goal to move off of 
squeak-dev sometime during 3.7alpha.

There have been various ideas thrown around for a new harvesting/BFAV 
back-end (such as something based on SqueakMap, or Monticello, or a 
plain ftp site), but I think a mailing list may be quite reasonable and 
also the least amount of effort.  (Although if someone wants another 
sort of back-end that would be great too, but we'd need a volunteer to 
work on it.  Speak up! ;-) )

Of course a mailing list back-end should be separate from squeak-dev... 
it's easy for Cees to set up a new list.  (subscribers could sign up 
for the digest, or possibly write-only, if they don't want the traffic)

The only issue would be doing something about the sqfixes archive at 
http://swiki.gsug.org:8080/SQFIXES/ , the rest is pretty easy.  There 
are at least a few options:

1. Bert could switch his site to use the new list.  Simplest, although 
I think Bert didn't really want to see his site used as the permanent 
harvesting back-end.

2. Set up another MailArchiveAction server or similar on a different 
server.  (Maybe based on Bert's, although I think that's based on 
something like Squeak 2.2.)

3. Have the BFAV parse the MailMan list archives directly.  This is 
less desirable in some ways because the archiver is not Squeak-based.

4. (insert additional solutions here)

- Doug Way