[Mailman-Developers] Hacking pipermail...

[Mark Sapiro]

----- Original Message ---------------
Brad Knowles wrote:

>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.

Are you referring to
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1059566&group_id=103&atid=350103


>>  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.

I think if you follow the suggestion in the last paragraph of this
caveat which I added to
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.003.htp
last July, you can edit the source mbox without changing the numbering
when you rebuild.


  CAVEAT: If you delete entire messages from the archive two side
  effects occur:

  1) Threading may be broken - if C is In-Reply-To: B which is
  In-Reply-To: A, and B is deleted, C will no longer be threaded with A.

  2) Messages will be renumbered - this may be important if there are
  saved links to archive messages. Since the message number is part of
  the URI, the saved link will no longer work or will retrieve the wrong
  message.

  To avoid these problems, instead of deleting the entire message, leave
  the headers intact and replace the body with "Message deleted" or some
  other meaningful text.

Please let me know if this is not correct.

>	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.

I absolutely agree.

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