G. Armour Van Horn writes:

The host intends to upgrade so that we can address that but they report that they haven't been able to make archives searchable in their experimentation with 2.1.16.

It's worth upgrading all the way to 21.1.18-1 if at all possible. That version provides which restricts the need to corrupt the message to messages that need to be altered.

I don't know if that search function is part of the more recent versions of Pipermail or if they've installed something else.

Pipermail hasn't changed in ages, and still does not provide a search function.

There are a large number of alternatives available, ranging from delegating the search function to sites like Google, GMane, or mail-archive.com (which all provide different features), to installing a different archiver, to installing a 3rd party search package like MHonArc. There's a fair amount of advice in the FAQ and more in the list archives.

I'm nervous about attempting to upgrade, given the paucity of documentation for that, particularly the fact that it tells me to use the same configuration options I used for the current install and I haven't a clue what those might have been.

If you're speaking about the 2.1.12 list and it's a vanilla installation (without local tweaks), either from source or by the host's package manager, the docs are complete. Just stop Mailman, upgrade (using the same method as the original install), and restart. The new Mailman will pick up the list configuration from the old files. The Mailman internal databases are well-designed to rarely need any adjustment by the site admin, and it actually works that way in practice. The main issues arise when you change format from a distro package to install from source or vice versa, because they set up the package hierarchies differently. That's why I recommend using the same format where possible (and since the distros often trail upstream by months on important upgrades, installing from source since that guarantees we take responsiblity for the upgrade process if you decide to install from source at some point).

It's possible make mistakes during the upgrade, but in general they all have to do with the installation of the new Mailman rather than preserving the original configuration, or with changes to configuration that occur due to moving hosts or something like that at the same time.

For the 2.1.9 list, I seem to recall there were a few manual adjustments at 2.1.10 and 2.1.11 that might need to be made by someone with direct access to the host. Regards,