[Mailman-Developers] Re: 2006 archives already online!

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "F" == Fil  <fil@rezo.net> writes:

    F> "When sent" is the default. How do you change the default to
    F> "When Resent"?  Shouldn't it be changed in the mailman's
    F> Defaults.py ?

>>>>> "MM" == Marc MERLIN <marc_news@valinux.com> writes:

    MM> I very firmly believe this, and so do all the people who have
    MM> archives showing messages with dates of 2004 or 1990.
    MM> http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/

    MM> I've asked the same thing in the past, but it didn't go
    MM> through.

We've talked in the past of adding an option to clobber_date to only
munge dates when they're outrageous.  This turns out to be easy to do,
and I'm willing to add it for 2.1 (I'm hacking the code right now).

However, it seems to me that this really ought to be a site-wide
configuration instead of a list-specific configuration.  I don't see a
whole lot of value in allowing lists to individually clobber the
dates.  I see this as going hand-in-hand with external archiving;
e.g. you may not want to clober the date if you're using an external
archiver, because perhaps it performs its /own/ sanity checks on the
Date: header.

So my proposal is to

- get rid of clobber_date as a list-specific variable

- add a site variable ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY which takes one of
  three values: 0 (never override the original message's Date:
  header); 1 (always override the original message's Date: header with
  the `processed' date); 2 (only override the header if the date is
  outrageous).

- add a site variable ARCHIVER_ALLOWABLE_SANE_DATE_SKEW which
  specifies a time in seconds outside of which the Date will be
  considered outrageous (i.e if its either too early or too late).

Comments?
-Barry