[Mailman-Users] archive/attachment preening

[Mark Sapiro]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Savoy, Jim wrote:
|
| Please confirm the assumptions I am about to make before I write the
| preening
| scripts for cron. I also want to write a bunch of scripts that look for
| certain information.
|
| 1) If a list is digestable and archiving was never turned on, then the
|    archives/private/listname/index.html will contain only the
| originally-created file
|    (which basically says "No messages have been posted to this list yet,
| so the
|    archives are currently empty").


It may also contain an archives/private/listname/attachments directory
with attachments that were scrubbed from 'plain' digests or scrubbed
from messages if scrub_nondigest (not in 2.1.5) is Yes.


| 2) If there is no mbox file in the /archives/private/listname.mbox
| directory, then the list
|     has never had archiving turned on.


Or never had a post.


| 3) If a list is digestable but there is no attachments directory in
| /archives/private/listname,
|     then the list has never had a message posted to it.


It may have had posts, just no posts with scrubbed attachments.


| 4) If the list is digestable, and archiving has never been turned on,
| then files in the
|     archives/private/listname/attachments directory are only useful to
| already-existing
|     subscribers who have digesting turned on (ie if I poll a list and it
| has no members
|     subscribed as digest users, then it is safe to delete all files in
| the attachments tree).


It could have had a digest member who received and saved a digest with a
link to a scrubbed attachment, and later switched to message mode.

Also in later Mailman, it could be a list with scrub_nondigest = Yes
that has scrubbed attachments from messages as opposed to digests.


| If all of my above assumptions are correct, my psuedo-code would do
| something like this:
|
|   if (list is not archived and has no digest members)
|       keep stuff in attachments dir for 1 month;
|
|   if (list is not archived but does have digest members)
|     keep stuff in attachments dir for 1 year;
|
|   if (list is archived)
|     keep stuff in attachments dir for 3 years;
|
| For the archived lists (we have about 150 of them) I will contact the
| owners first, to warn them
| that I plan to pare their archive down to 3 years max. If they protest,
| I will add them as an
| exception to the rule and skip over them during the cron job run. I know
| that there is more to
| be done with regards to reducing the size of archives (ie running arch
| --wipe on the editted, pared
| down .mbox file, but I will do that manually). For now I am mostly
| interesting in keeping the
| stuff in the attachments directories to a minimum. I realize that
| deleting stuff in /attachments
| breaks links in the archive and digest messages, but I think that is
| reasonable for the really
| old messages (provided the list owner concurs).
|
| One final question. I know that you can change a list's settings with
| /bin/config_list, but can you
| poll a list for settings? For example, you can use "/bin/list_members
| -d" to see which members
| of a list read in digest mode, but how can I find out which lists have
| archiving turned on? Or do I
| have to examine the archives/private tree to garner that kind of info?
| Thanks!


bin/config_list -o - listname | grep '^archive ='

- --
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFIRMtoVVuXXpU7hpMRAm1aAKC51yGIwts/ERvVX2bM2bv6FKs4ZQCg7GKN
FFgmgpQQPLrkmLCUpbR3KE8=
=6zUj
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----