[Mailman-Users] Problem with /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch --wipe

[Barry Finkel]

Some people say that it is bad netiquette to respond to one's own
posting; those who agree can ignore this posting, if you want.

I wrote earlier today:

>I have converted a list from Majordomo to Mailman.  I took the
>collected Majordomo archives and built an mbox file.  I used this
>mbox file with
>
>     /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch --wipe $LISTNAME $LISTNAME.mbox
>
>Some of the old archives from 1995 are appearing in the September 2007
>list.  Here is the header from the first message in the Sep 2007
>archive:
>
>>From owner-women-in-science  Wed May  3 11:57:56 1995
>Received: (from majordom at localhost) by achilles.ctd.anl.gov (8.6.11/8.6.11) id LAA28996 for women-in-science-outgoing; Wed, 3 May 1995 11:57:56 -0500
>Received: from dns2.anl.gov (dns2.anl.gov [130.202.20.3]) by achilles.ctd.anl.gov (8.6.11/8.6.11) with ESMTP id LAA28990 for <women-in-science at achilles.ctd.anl.gov>; Wed, 3 May 1995 11:57:54 -0500
>Received: from ANLVM.CTD.ANL.GOV (anlvm.ctd.anl.gov [146.137.96.2]) by dns2.anl.gov (8.6.11/8.6.11) with SMTP id LAA12146 for <women-in-science at anl.GOV>; Wed, 3 May 1995 11:57:53 -0500
>Message-Id: <199505031657.LAA12146 at dns2.anl.gov>
>Received: from ANLVM by ANLVM.CTD.ANL.GOV (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2ANL-MX) with BSMTP id 5404; Wed, 03 May 95 11:57:40 CDT
>Received: from ANLCMB.BITNET (xxxxx) by ANLVM (Mailer R2.07B) with BSMTP id 1479; Wed, 03 May 95 11:57:39 CDT
>Date:     3-MAY-1995 11:33:41.02
>From: <xxxxx%ANLCMB at ANLVM.ctd.anl.gov>
>To: GATEWAY::"women-in-science at anl.gov"@dns2.anl.gov
>X-ANJE-To: GATEWAY::"women-in-science at anl.gov"
>Subject: May 5 First Friday Forum
>Sender: Women-in-Science-Owner at achilles.ctd.anl.gov
>Precedence: bulk
>
>
>and here are the headers from the last of the 35 messages in that
>archive:
>
>>From owner-women-in-science  Thu Apr 13 15:04:21 1995
>Received: (from majordom at localhost) by achilles.ctd.anl.gov (8.6.11/8.6.11) id PAA16016 for women-in-science-outgoing; Thu, 13 Apr 1995 15:04:21 -0500
>Received: from anl.gov (dns2.anl.gov [130.202.20.3]) by achilles.ctd.anl.gov (8.6.11/8.6.11) with SMTP id PAA16010 for <women-in-science at achilles.ctd.anl.gov>; Thu, 13 Apr 1995 15:04:19 -0500
>Received: from ANLVM.CTD.ANL.GOV by anl.gov (4.1/SMI-4.1)
>        id AA21398; Thu, 13 Apr 95 15:04:17 CDT
>Message-Id: <9504132004.AA21398 at anl.gov>
>Received: from ANLVM by ANLVM.CTD.ANL.GOV (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.2ANL-MX) with BSMTP id 2878; Thu, 13 Apr 95 15:04:09 CDT
>Received: from ANLCMB.BITNET (xxxxx) by ANLVM (Mailer R2.07B) with BSMTP id 8608; Thu, 13 Apr 95 15:04:09 CDT
>Date:    13-APR-1995 14:58:06.26
>From: <xxxxx%ANLCMB at ANLVM.ctd.anl.gov>
>To: GATEWAY::"women-in-science at anl.gov"@ANLVM.ctd.anl.gov
>X-Anje-To: GATEWAY::"women-in-science at anl.gov"
>Subject: Science Demonstrations at Child Development Center
>Sender: Women-in-Science-Owner at achilles.ctd.anl.gov
>Precedence: bulk
>
>These message were from 1995, when we were connected to BITNET.
>What in Mailman 2.1.9 is causing these messages to be archived in the
>wrong month?  I have not had time to look at any python code.  Could
>it be the hyphens in the date:
>
>     Date:    13-APR-1995 14:58:06.26
>
>Thanks.
>
>I have converted many lists from Majordomo to Mailman using the same
>procedure, and, while I have not looked at the newly-built Mailman
>list archives in detail, I have not seen this problem before.

After looking at the messages in question, looking at the code,
looking at the mail RFC 2822, and doing a Google search, I found
the messages that had two problems with the "Date:" line:

     Date:    13-APR-1995 14:58:06.26

This line has "-" instead of white space, and the seconds field has
added hundredths of a second.  Once I went through the mbox file and
corrected these, the mbox file was loaded into the archives
successfully.  I had first converted the "-" to " ", but that did not
solve the problem.  I had to remove the ".nn" hundredths of a second
to get the date to correspond to the RFC 2822 format.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994