Merge lp:~kfogel/launchpad/old-1.6-ml-archiver-ui into lp:launchpad

Make some basic improvements to our mailing list archives user interface.
(This is the "low-hanging fruit" part of bug #375557.)

Summary:
--------

  When we switched to MHonArc for mailing list archives, the archive
  pages became very Web 1.0, looking unlike the rest of Launchpad and
  having various usability problems: all the messages in chronological
  order on one page (should be reverse-chronological and multi-page),
  no indication of what team the mailing list is for, etc.

  This branch just brings us back to roughly where we were with
  Pipermail on lists.canonical.com / lists.ubuntu.com. It does not
  address everything in bug #375557 (which describes many further
  improvements we could make to our mailing list archives).

  This branch makes the following changes to the mailing list archives:

    - Use multi-page indexes, so large archives don't swamp browsers.
    - Sort messages in reverse chronological order.
    - Show the date next to each message on an index page.
    - Show the mailing list's name, and link back to the team.
    - Give pages a white background, instead of browser-default-gray.
    - Put Launchpad logo in upper left corner.

Proposed fix:
-------------

  Create a Launchpad-wide MHonArc control file, to customize the
  appearance of mailing list archive pages (both the indexes and the
  individual messages). Discussed with Barry and Kiko.

Pre-implementation notes:
-------------------------

  Barry and I talked a lot. I don't think any issues came up that
  need mentioning here. We knew we were aiming for the low-hanging
  fruit, and that's what we got.

Implementation details:
-----------------------

  Code changes:

  * lib/canonical/launchpad/mailman/monkeypatches/lp-mhonarc-common.mrc:
    New rc file, controls MHonArc behavior.

  * lib/canonical/launchpad/mailman/monkeypatches/__init__.py
    (monkey_patch): Add flags to PUBLIC_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER to define the
    mailing list name and point MHonArc to the common rc file. Copy the
    rc file to the correct location.

  Along the way, I discovered that we were not really set up for testing
  changes to "lists.launchpad.dev", and made two branches to fix that:

    https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~kfogel/launchpad/lists-in-hosts
    https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~kfogel/launchpad/lists-testable

  The first has passed EC2 tests and been submitted to PQM. The
  second is (in theory) done, but not yet tested.

Tests:
------

  Er, see "Demo and Q/A".

Demo and Q/A:
-------------

  * Start launchpad.dev with 'make run_all'.

  * Log in to launchpad.dev as "<email address hidden>" (this test user
    should already exist, and have the appropriate administrative
    privileges).

  * Create a new team 'mltest'.

  * Create a mailing list for that team.

  * Approve the mailing list (at http://launchpad.dev/+mailinglists).

  * Inject the sample data, which you get from here:

    http://launchpadlibrarian.net/26091302/lp-ml-test-data.tar.gz

    Untar it, cd into the resultant lp-ml-test-data/ directory, and
    run "./inject.sh" (while launchpad.dev is running, of course).

    There are 999 messages in the data. They're originally from the
   ...

Hi Karl,

Could you possibly just provide a screenshot of this so I can review?
Steps to reproduce seem long and painful :)

Martin Albisetti <email address hidden> writes:
> Could you possibly just provide a screenshot of this so I can review?
> Steps to reproduce seem long and painful :)

:-) Sure:

  http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/ml-archiver-ui-screenshots/

Hi Karl,

Thanks for working on this, it's a very big improvement.

The only comment I have, is that the sender and the date should be somehow visually distinct (looking at: http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/ml-archiver-ui-screenshots/new-ml-archives-by-thread-top.png), maybe the sender could be in bold?
Also, maybe the date should be YYYY-MM-DD instead of YYYY/MM/DD, as using slashes usually means it's formatted.

Neither of these are blockers for the branch to land, but would be nice :)

> The only comment I have, is that the sender and the date should be somehow
> visually distinct (looking at: http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/ml-archiver-ui-
> screenshots/new-ml-archives-by-thread-top.png), maybe the sender could be in
> bold?

Done, for the thread index only (using bold didn't look so good for
the date index, so I didn't do it there). On the thread index, it
is a big improvement.

> Also, maybe the date should be YYYY-MM-DD instead of YYYY/MM/DD, as using
> slashes usually means it's formatted.

That turns out to be a bit tricky, due to the way MHonArc works. I'm
not even sure it can be done without modifying MHonArc itself, which
so far we've managed to avoid. Leaving as YYYY/MM/DD for now.

Thanks for the review!

Karl, thanks for working on this, it's a *huge* improvement! I have just a couple of comments.

* Should the link to the team be an https link? It'll probably get redirected there anyway so might as well send people to the right place the first time.

* Should there be a link to the help wiki's mailing lists page?

* Please coordinate with the LOSAs to regenerate all the existing archives. I think we want to switch them all over to the new and improved look. It shouldn't be difficult; probably one command per list, and that could be scripted (and tested on staging).

> Karl, thanks for working on this, it's a *huge* improvement! I have just a
> couple of comments.
>
> * Should the link to the team be an https link? It'll probably get redirected
> there anyway so might as well send people to the right place the first time.
>
> * Should there be a link to the help wiki's mailing lists page?

Done in r8117.

> * Please coordinate with the LOSAs to regenerate all the existing archives. I
> think we want to switch them all over to the new and improved look. It
> shouldn't be difficult; probably one command per list, and that could be
> scripted (and tested on staging).

Will do.

Note to self: the relevant wiki page is

   https://wiki.canonical.com/ImportingMailingListArchives

The mhonarc command there needs to be tweaked -- it should be told to read
the new config file.