[Mailman-Developers] [Mailman-Users] Mailman archive messages(not rm, but install!)

[Barry Warsaw]

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On Dec 8, 2006, at 11:10 AM, Paul Tomblin wrote:

>> In that case, shouldn't any message that reaches mailman with an
>> unescaped From_ line in the body already be handled properly?  It
>> seems like something else must be borked.  That or all of the  
>> messages
>> in a list mbox that contain unescaped From_ lines got there from
>> really old versions of Mailman/python.
>
> That is distinctly possible.  The archives in question go back to  
> 1998.  I
> didn't keep track of when the *last* unescaped From_ line was put  
> in the
> archives.

Sorry, I should have been clearer that the /default/ behavior of the  
generator is to mangle From_ lines.  So it's true that nothing in  
Mailman should need to be changed.

However, it's also true that in the distant past, there were some  
bugs in the mbox implementation which would cause broken mbox files  
to be written.  A quick scan through the svn logs jogs my memory:  
r6341 on 2003-04-17 was added to fix a message separation bug.  I  
don't know how long that bug was lurking, but the fix puts it just  
before the 2.1.2 release according to the NEWS file.  I'll bet that  
it existed from 2.1 final (Dec 2002) until 2.1.2 (Apr 2003), the  
latter which was probably released specifically to fix this problem!

Note that this bug had no effect on the archiving of new messages on  
the fly.  Those always got archived correctly.  But the message was  
appended to the mbox file incorrectly which meant that if you  
regenerated your archives, you'd be screwed.  This was what bin/ 
cleanarch was intended to fix.

BTW, one less ambitious way to participate here to help fix things  
would be to improve bin/cleanarch.  At the very least, you should be  
able to run that script and get an mbox file that bin/arch can use to  
DTRT.  It would also be nice if bin/arch was able to compensate for  
running out of memory, possibly by changing it to fork a sub-process  
to do the actual archiving with the parent process pre-chunking the  
workload for the child.

Anyway, I'm cc'ing mailman-developers.  Further discussion of how to  
improve matters should be conducted on that list (and mailman-users  
should be removed).

- -Barry

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