[Mailman-Users] External Archiver question ..again...

[Todd Pfaff]

Rob,

I don't have any experience using an external archiver as you're asking
about so this answer is not directly related to your question, but I have
done a lot of recent work converting some old listproc archives to mailman
pipermail archives using the mailman arch program.  This information may
help you with your archiver conversion process.

I was adding some old listproc archives to the existing pipermail archives
for a list that I had moved from listproc to mailman a while ago.  The
list had been active under mailman and so had generated some new pipermail
archives, and I wanted to get the old listproc archives prepended to the
new mailman archives.  Since I had to do some trial-and-error testing of
the conversion process, I needed a quick way to be able to completely
regenerate all the HTML archives from the original text mbox files.  This
turned out to be easier than I first thought.

What I found is that you can quite easily recreate the pipermail HTML
archives at any time by doing the following:

cd /usr/local/mailman
rm -rf archives/private/listname
./bin/arch russell-l archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox

So, what you would have to do is to backup the listname.mbox files from
your old mailman installation before reinstalling mailman.  Then, for each
list, run the procedure above to recreate the html archives.

I imagine a similar process would work if one was changing from pipermail
archives to some other external archiver such as MHonArc.  Please let us
know how the conversion goes since I'd also like to try using MHonArc.

I think it would be useful for all of us if anyone has gone through such
a conversion process already that they could contribute any programs they
used to automate the process.


On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Hostmaster wrote:

> OK here is the story...
> 
> I have a mailing list that is primarily graphics based meaning emails with
> gif's & jpg's in them...
> 
> Now with pipermail no one can view the attachments/graphics. Now I heard
> there is a patch for this? The option of using an external archive, like
> "MHonArc" which can do inline images or decode the uuencode which ever is
> more correct.
> 
>  I finally got a hold of CVS installed it and got to the CVS server and got
> the latest source(I guess as of today) now, do I have to re-install the
> whole thing again? If so what will happen to my existing mailing lists and
> archives? If I do does it automatically make all existing archives readable
> or just the new ones...?
> 
> 
> OR can I just replace the Defaults.py file and set EXTERNAL_PUBLIC_ARCHIVER
> =0 to "1" and keep my version I have now that I got on the 19th of Oct ?
> And if so,  how does it know where the external archive is and what command
> line to use?
> 
> I am sorry for bothering anyone regarding this but I find it difficult to
> find info on this and how to implement it...??
> 
> Any help from someone who has done it would be greatly appreciated!!!
> 
> THANKS!
> 
> Rob Morin
> Montreal, Canada
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Mailman-Users maillist  -  Mailman-Users at python.org
> http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
> 

--
Todd Pfaff                         \  Email: pfaff at mcmaster.ca
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