[Mailman-Users] "No subject" messages in archives

[Barry Warsaw]

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On May 25, 2007, at 1:17 PM, Ivan Van Laningham wrote:

> I locked the list with withlist.  I then edited the .mbox file with  
> vim
> and deleted 2662737 lines, all the messages that had malformed 'From '
> lines (no dates at the end of the lines).  On my somewhat slow machine
> (2.2GHZ Celeron), with only a gig of memory, this took about 10  
> minutes.
>   I was willing to wait. ;-)
>
> After saving modified .mbox, I exited withlist without saving.  I then
> catted the corrected old archive .mbox file to the end of the modified
> .mbox.  Then I ran arch.  That, too, took a while, maybe half-an-hour
> for about 49,000 messages.  Again, I was willing to wait. ;-)

The only thing I would add is that the default lock lifetime is 15  
seconds, so it's possible some other process would have broken the  
lock during that time.  That you didn't get an exception when you  
exited (and thus unlocked) the list is a good sign that didn't  
happen. ;)

Given the MailList object, there's no easy way to extend the lock's  
lifetime.  You can hack the LockFile.py file, or do something like:

 >>> m._MailList__lock.refresh(60 * minute)

> I'm actually willing to live with these, unless they're damaging the
> archives somehow.  Any guesses as to how difficult it would be to fix
> these by say, simply editing the .mbox and re-running arch --wipe?

Unsure.  What does bin/cleanarch -n say?

- -Barry

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