Starting with 3.9alpha all new bugs, fixes, and enhancements should be reported to the Mantis Server, see Reporting Bugs and Fixes for more information. In late August or early September of 2005 the BFAV Server will be changed to read-only mode in which case ne new submissions can be added. Later in 2005 or 2006 the BFAV server will be retired altogether.
For the Frank Shearar, Ken Causey designed, implemented, tested and deployed a new Bug Fixes Archive Server design that uses Exim + a Python script to generate static files that are served up by Apache. Brent Vukmer (and later Tom Koenig and Frank Shearar) developed the BFAV2 Client which you use to access the BFAV server in most cases.
The server subscribes to the squeak-dev and squeak-harvest lists, but only accepts squeak-harvest posts that have the magic header set. As each post comes in, the server updates the BFAV Server Listing with a row that summarizes the post (including the id that the server has assigned to the post), then adds the post to a ZIP file. Clients can request the listing, any individual ZIP file, or a list of posts by id over HTTP.
Clients synchronize with the server as follows:
Synchronize the local copy of the listing with the server's listing
Parse the listing into ArchivePost objects
Present the list of ArchivePost objects in the client UI
When an ArchivePost object is selected in the client, the request the ZIP file from the server containing the .eml file for that post
Extract the .eml file and save any MIME attachments
