zip or bzip2 should be compression choices as well as gzip

[Tom Browder]

Currently gzip is the only compression choice. Novice Windows users usually have a zip utility available but may not be able to easily install another utility like 7-Zip that can handle gzip.

Also, bzip2 (or other compression utility) may be a better compression choice than gzip for very active mailing lists

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

Presumably, you are talking about the archive periodic text files. Compression of these files is a holdover from the days of much more limited bandwidth. It makes no sense in today's internet. It actually consumes additional space on the server because the uncompressed files are still kept along side the compressed ones. Further, depending on the configuration of the web server, the compressed file may actually be uncompressed before transmission to the browser.

For these reasons, I recommend you remove the cron/nightly_gzip job from Mailman's crontab and remove any archives/private/LISTNAME/PERIOD.txt.gz files from the server. Then, the next time the archive TOC page is updated, all the links will revert to the .txt files.

[Tom Browder (tbrowder)]

Thanks for the consideration, Mark, and I will follow your suggestion. How about a FAQ item from your suggestion? As well as a posting on the users list?