trac-hacks / tracmailman

Trac plugin that interfaces with Mailman mailing lists.

TracMailman

About

TracMailman is a plugin for Trac that integrates with Mailman, allowing users to browse mailing list archives and search the mailing list, all from a tab within Trac.

Created by Spencer Fang <[e-mail]> and Theron Ji <[e-mail]>. Additional development by Benjamin Weaver <[e-mail]>.

Contents

README.rst
setup.py
swish-e.config
swish-e.sh
trac-mailman.ini
tracmailman/
tracmailman/__init__.py
tracmailman/paths.py
tracmailman/web_ui.py
tracmailman/templates/
tracmailman/templates/tracmailman.html
tracmailman/templates/tracmailmanbrowser.html
tracmailman/templates/tracmailmanoptions.html
tracmailman/templates/tracmailmansearch.html

Requirements

• Trac (0.11.1 or above recomended)
• Mailman (2.1.11 or above recomended)
• Swish-e (2.4.5 or above recommended)
• Python Swish-e bindings (0.5 or above recommended)

Functionality

This plugin adds a 'Mailing Lists' tab inside of trac. Users logged in will be able to click on this tab and be taken to a search page, where they can choose to search a particular mailing list (or 'All'), or browse through the mailing lists, all within Trac.

This plugin handles privacy concerns by looking at a manually specified list of mailing lists inside the trac.ini configuration file, and preventing searches or browsing on those lists. NOTE: this functionality is disabled for all users, including those who may have the proper permissions. It is conceivable that this feature is changed in later versions of the plugin.

Installation

1. Verify requirements have been met!
2. In the plugin directory, run python setup.py bdist_egg to produce a .egg file under the dist/ directory.
3. Copy the .egg into the plugins/ directory under the Trac project
4. Edit the trac-mailman.ini file appropriately (see Configuring trac.ini below)
5. Add the contents of trac-mailman.ini to the trac.ini file inside your Trac project (default location under yourproject/conf/)
6. Set the appropriate variables in swish-e.sh. (see 'Configuring Swish-e' below). Run it to create the index files¹.
7. Restart the Trac daemon - the plugin should now be functional.
8. Set up a cron job or some script to periodically run swish-e.sh to re-index the archives to keep the search up-to-date.

Configuring trac.ini

In the trac.ini configuration file, 3 items need to be specified under the [tracmailman] section:

private_lists

As mentioned above, this will be a comma separated list of mailing lists that should not be made publicly searchable or browsable. Obsolete lists that still remain archived but are no longer of any use may also be put here. This is not related to the private directory created by default under /var/lib/mailman/archives/private. Defaults to nothing.

mail_archive_path

This should be set to the full path to the top-level directory of where the mailman archives are stored. Default location is at /var/lib/mailman/archives.

search_index_path

This should be set to the full path of where the search indices created by Swish-e are located. This must be the same as the $INDEX_LOCATION variable in the swish-e.sh script.

Configuring Swish-e

To use the search feature of the plugin, you must have Swish-e installed and an index file to search in. The config file for Swish-e is included, (swish-e.config), as well as a shell script (swish-e.sh). The swish-e.config file should not be changed, but modifications should be made to the swish-e.sh script to tell it 1) where the config file is, and 2) where to store the indices created by the search engine.

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1. The private mailman archive (/var/lib/mailman/archives/private) has read permission restricted to root or the mailman group, by default. In order for Trac to be able to read these files, and the Swish-e script to be able index these files, they must be run with appropriate permissions.↩