marnanel | Two tiny lunchtime Yarrow fixes (Reply)

Yesterday I fixed the indexing problem on rgtp.thurman.org.uk (by simply deleting the indexes; they're only a cache). I'm sorry it was down for a couple of days.

Over lunch today I believe I fixed the encoding issue discussed in Y0342114 (it was a single line of code). A GREED user has confirmed that Yarrow-generated pound signs are displayed correctly. If I don't hear of any problems I'll be making a Yarrow release tonight or tomorrow night; it will be v1.3, I believe. (I'm not certain, because 1.2 was released in 2002 and the records are a little shaky since then.)

Other things which may be on the horizon, if anyone asks for them:

(this one may be fixed now)
the index would probably be more reliable if it was stored in a relational database rather than Python pickles; ISTR this was vetoed a few years ago by some site running Yarrow which didn't want to install a relational database, so fair enough. (Maybe we could use sqlite, though.)
the code would be a lot more readable if it used some kind of templating system, but that would require every site using it to install the same templating system; I like the Python port of Template Toolkit, but it's not packaged in Ubuntu at least, and I imagine there are more Pythony solutions around. Can anyone suggest something?
it might be useful to debianise the package so it was easier to create mirrors; I know a fair amount about building .debs but I'm not familiar with packaging Python programs, so any help with that is welcome.
if an item which was once seen is later reported missing on the server, remove all record of it from the index.
the long-threatened switch to remove the distinction between Yarrow accounts and GROGGS accounts, using your GROGGS shared-secret as a password to log into Yarrow instead of a separate step. This would remove most of the problem of Yarrow mirrors not sharing user databases.

Thoughts and ideas are welcome.