[Mailman-Users] problem with mm.arch

[David Relson]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 09:46:06 -0700
Mark Sapiro wrote:

> David Relson wrote:
> >
> >I think I've encountered a gotcha with mm.arch.
> 
> I'm confused. do you mean bin/arch or are you talking about some older
> Mailman that I don't know about?

M
> 
> >In May 2004 I brought up mailman with list archives (from another
> >program).  All went well, AFAICT.  A few days ago the listserver's
> >hard drive crashed and I rebuilt the list archives from the monthly
> >mbox files.  I was very surprised to see that the newly created
> >archives had zillions of messages in the 2004-May directories and
> >nothing for prior months.
> >
> >Looking at the YYYY-Month.txt mbox files, I saw that all messages
> >earlier than May 2004 had "Date: Mon May  3 hh:mm:dd 2004" lines,
> >i.e. the Date: line shows when mm.arch is run.
> 
> 
> Yes. It appears that when an archive is built with bin/arch, the Date:
> header in the YYYY-Month.txt files is the date that bin/arch is run.
> That surprised me too.
> 
> 
> >This seems wrong.  From mm.arch's help message and the mbox file
> >format, it seems that rebuilding with:
> >
> >  cat mylist/*.txt > mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox
> >  mm.arch --wipe --quiet mylist mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox
> >
> >should produce the same archive as when you start.
> 
> My question is why are you using the above process to create a global
> mylist.mbox file instead of just using the existing one.
> 
> If you built your archive initially by creating a
> mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox file with your imported archives and then
> running bin/arch. Then the archiver would continue to append new
> messages to mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox and this will always be a complete
> archive that can be used as input to bin/arch --wipe
> 
> 
> >It seems that my ideas for rebuilding don't quite fit with reality.
> >What am I overlooking?
> 
> 
> Actually, I am surprised that what you did had this result. I thought
> the bin/arch process used the date from the "From " line and not the
> Date: header. I thought I remembered from my archive import struggles
> that the date had to be correct in the "From " line.
> 
> 
> >P.S.  My solution to this problem was a perl script that extracts the
> >date from the "^From " line and puts it in the Date: line.  It's not a
> >wonderful solution, but it works.  (If I knew python better, I'd write
> >fix.archive.dates.py to handle this situation).
> 
> 
> That would probably be useful, and one to put the address and date from
> the From: and Date: into the "From " would help with some archive
> import situations.
> 
> 
> --
> Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
> San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan


-- 
David Relson                   Osage Software Systems, Inc.
relson at osagesoftware.com       Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.osagesoftware.com          tel:  734.821.8800