Williams, Paul wrote:

I noticed that we are gzipping the archive files, nightly with

27 3 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /opt/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip

but it also leaves a copy of the uncompressed archives.

Is this the proper behavior?

It is what it is designed to do.

Is it possible to only have the gzipped archives and not the text files?

Yes, but you have to do it outside of Mailman. E.g., set up a cron to run on say the 3rd day of the month that runs a script that removes the .txt files for the prior month. There is a small risk to this for the same reason you can't remove the current month's .txt file. If a post arrives for a month whose .txt file is missing, it will create a new .txt file containing only that post, and that file will be gzipped on the next nightly gzip (or immediately if GZIP_ARCHIVE_TXT_FILES = Yes in mm_cfg.py), thus losing the prior contents of the .gz file. Of course, everything is still in the list.mbox/list.mbox file, so it isn't completely lost, but it's awkward.

If I comment out the above nightly_gzip line will it cause a problem?

No. If there is no .txt.gz file, the archive link will be to the .txt file. The only reason to have the .txt.gz files is to reduce the size of the file(s) a user may download, but with many web servers configured to expand .gz files before serving them, this is not a consideration.

Of course, the .gz files do save space on the server, but only if the .txt files are removed which isn't too practical as I note above.

-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan