[Mailman-Developers] Hacking pipermail...

[Brad Knowles]

At 5:40 PM -0800 2005-02-05, Mark Sapiro wrote:

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

	Dang.  I had searched for it as a bug, and had forgotten that I'd 
filed it as an RFE instead.  Sigh....

>    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.

	No, you've got it right.

	That would help us on mailman-users and mailman-developers, for 
the requests that we've gotten to delete some old messages from the 
archives.  Except that there has been a policy decision that we don't 
want to edit the source mailbox itself, we want that to be kept as a 
permanent record of what was sent to the list.  We're still trying to 
figure out how we're going to make that work.


	However, the problem I had on the other list was that there had 
been a problem on the system, and I only had February 2005 archives 
available, with message numbers starting at the beginning.  How do 
you backfill the older archives (from the same source mbox file) 
without regenerating the message numbers?


	I guess if I'd been thinking about it, I could have broken the 
mbox file into two parts, one that had already been processed and the 
rest, and avoid blowing away the old archives while I import the 
previously unprocessed mbox file

	But what do you do afterwards?  Do you re-stitch the mbox files 
together so that you can re-create the archives in the future if 
there is a catastrophic failure, or do you leave the mbox files 
permanently separated?  If you do leave them permanently separated, 
where do you leave them and how do you make sure that the right thing 
happens to the right ones, as new messages are processed?


	At the time, the only thing I could figure was to follow the 
instructions in FAQ 3.3.

-- 
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.