List archives text format not mbox compatible?
It appears that the text versions of the list archives that are generated by pipermail are not in mbox format Namely, the "From " line is built in a way that isn't compatible with mbox-based MUAs.
I had never noticed this before, but it seems like there is no reason not to make them compatible with mbox. I think the most useful thing about offering text archives is that you can grab them and read them into an mbox MUA.
Was the change in the "From " line format intentional, or is it a bug? if the former, can someone please explain the thinking behind it?
-- Bradley M. Kuhn - http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn
On Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 02:22:09PM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
It appears that the text versions of the list archives that are generated by pipermail are not in mbox format Namely, the "From " line is built in a way that isn't compatible with mbox-based MUAs.
That's so for Mailman 1.1, and for old versions of 2.0beta. It's been fixed somewhere between 2.0b3 and 2.0b4, IIRC. At least, if we're talking about the same thing :) Since you don't elaborate on what's actually *wrong* with the 'From ' lines, I can't say for sure :) The problem used to be that the date on the 'From ' line wasn't in the default 'time.ctime()' format, but rather in the format of the date string that was contained in the message itself.
-- Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>
Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!
Thomas Wouters wrote:
That's so for Mailman 1.1, and for old versions of 2.0beta. It's been fixed somewhere between 2.0b3 and 2.0b4, IIRC. At least, if we're talking about the same thing :) Since you don't elaborate on what's actually *wrong* with the 'From ' lines, I can't say for sure :)
Sorry, what I meant was, that the from lines look like:
From person@domain.dom Sat, 01 Jul 2000 14:18:09 -0500
rather than:
From person@domain.dom Sun Aug 20 03:06:48 2000
-- Bradley M. Kuhn - http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn
On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 04:54:40AM -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
Thomas Wouters wrote:
That's so for Mailman 1.1, and for old versions of 2.0beta. It's been fixed somewhere between 2.0b3 and 2.0b4, IIRC. At least, if we're talking about the same thing :) Since you don't elaborate on what's actually *wrong* with the 'From ' lines, I can't say for sure :)
Sorry, what I meant was, that the from lines look like:
From person@domain.dom Sat, 01 Jul 2000 14:18:09 -0500
rather than:
From person@domain.dom Sun Aug 20 03:06:48 2000
Yes. In Mailmans older than b3 or b4 or so, right ? Or are you seeing this with the latest Mailman beta or the CVS tree, too ?
-- Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>
Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!
"BMK" == Bradley M Kuhn <bkuhn@ebb.org> writes:
BMK> It appears that the text versions of the list archives that
BMK> are generated by pipermail are not in mbox format Namely, the
BMK> "From " line is built in a way that isn't compatible with
BMK> mbox-based MUAs.
BMK> I had never noticed this before, but it seems like there is
BMK> no reason not to make them compatible with mbox. I think the
BMK> most useful thing about offering text archives is that you
BMK> can grab them and read them into an mbox MUA.
BMK> Was the change in the "From " line format intentional, or is
BMK> it a bug? if the former, can someone please explain the
BMK> thinking behind it?It depends on exactly which files you're talking about. If you mean something like 2000-August.txt that's available from
http://www.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/under the "Downloadable version" link, then I think it /is/ mbox compatible. Or put it this way, both VM under XEmacs and Linux's mail(1) program grok those files just fine.
What specifically about the From_ line is bogus for you?
-Barry
It depends on exactly which files you're talking about. If you mean something like 2000-August.txt that's available from
Which brings up a minor nit of mine. I think that the archive file/directory names should be in the format '2000-08' -- it sorts much more nicely -- though I appreciate that this is unlikely to change before the release.
On the other note -- one can fix the previously mentioned problem by applying the right options to 'formail' -- I had to do that when migrating stuff from a lyris list, which doesn't keep the archives in mbox format, either.
Darrell
Darrell Fuhriman wrote:
It depends on exactly which files you're talking about. If you mean something like 2000-August.txt that's available from
Which brings up a minor nit of mine. I think that the archive file/directory names should be in the format '2000-08' -- it sorts much more nicely -- though I appreciate that this is unlikely to change before the release.
I really like that idea.
Another idea that I had: I recently had a need to get the entire archive of a mailing list and read it. It would be nice if list maintainers had the option, in the archive, to provide a single compressed mbox file of the entire past of the list.
It's a bit easier to download and concatenate the period spool files together.
-- Bradley M. Kuhn - http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn
participants (4)
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Bradley M. Kuhn -
bwarsaw＠beopen.com -
Darrell Fuhriman -
Thomas Wouters