[Mailman-Developers] Hacking pipermail...

[Brad Knowles]

At 2:49 PM -0800 2005-02-05, Mark Sapiro wrote:

>  In my admitedly limited experience, I have not seen message sequence
>  numbers "arbitrarily" changed. Sequence numbers are assigned to
>  messages in the order that they are read from the mbox file(s). Thus
>  the only times they change is if:

	No, they're not arbitrarily changed.  But they are changed if you 
have to rebuild the archives, something that I have had to do several 
times this past week.  And something that I've had to do in the past, 
and on which I filed a bug report which seems to have disappeared. 
And something that will be an issue for anyone who follows the 
instructions in FAQ 3.3, and has to delete an old message in the 
archives.

>  1)messages are added to or deleted from the mbox files which can be
>  avoided by only adding to the end of the last (current) mbox if
>  necessary and just deleting most of the body and perhaps changing the
>  subject instead of totally deleting the messages. There is a caveat
>  about deleting messages in
>  http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.003.htp

	At least a couple of times this year we have gotten requests to 
remove messages from the mailman-users and mailman-developers 
archives, which would have broken all the existing links over the 
last couple of years to those lists if we had implemented the 
instructions in FAQ 3.3.

	We're still trying to work out how we can find a way to comply 
with the requests with regards to the publicly accessible version of 
the archives we maintain, without actually editing the source mbox 
files.

>  Note that even case 3 can be recovered by removing the messages that
>  existed when the archive was last rebuilt and putting them in a
>  separate mbox which is processed in the original sequence and leaving
>  the recent messages in the listname.mbox/listname.mbox file and
>  processing it last.

	A fairly complex process to go through, and I'm still not 
convinced that it would work if you had to delete a message in the 
archives from a couple of years ago.

	I'd like to try to find a better way to solve this problem once 
and for all, so that the sequence id would never be changed.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.