I'm starting to merge in a bunch of old archives to linuxchix's current archives (under 2.0.10), and I ran in to a problem. Searching the mailing lists let me know that I wasn't the only one with the problem, but didn't give me the answer.

Here's a good description of the problem from a nice guy who sadly had to tell me he hadn't found the answer either, but there were a decent number of similar stories on the mailing list:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2002-May/019594.html

In my case, it was just refusing to build with the old archives inserted, so I was just keeping the same HTML pages even though the mbox file had been changed.

So, recalling that From lines could be a problem, I started going through the big archive file and discovered that right near the beginning, there's a message with two From lines. I remove one, and voila! the entire thing rebuilds.

I'm happy now, but in the interest of saving other people some effort and hairpulling... could a few lines about this be added to the FAQ (http://list.org/faq.html, I'd guess) and wherever else it's appropriate? I'd be quite happy to do this myself if someone can tell me how and what I need to do to get access. :)

Here's the quickly-written version:

Q: How do I rebuild the HTML pages for the archives?

A: Run <prefix>/bin/arch <listname> to rebuild the HTML.

If it says "Pickling archive state into <prefix>/archives/private/<listname>/pipermail.pck" but doesn't make any changes, (see http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2002-May/019594.html for a longer description of the problem) you may have a slightly corrupted mbox file which can't be read correctly by the archive generator.

Take a look at the mbox file (Typically: <prefix>/archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>.mbox) and make sure that each message is separated by one blank line and begins with one and only one line of the form From <email> <date>.

On the subject of documentation... Mary set this up so that it automatically subs in the appropriate list name to our FAQ.

http://www.linuxchix.org/content/docs/faqs/technical.html?listname=grrltalk

Has anyone ever thought about having a help page like this set up as part of mailman? I know it'd be nice to believe that the pages are clear enough as is, but I know sometimes a longer explanation can help people out.

Terri