[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

John A. Martin writes:

 >     >> better to go ahead and use the mesage-id, rather than concoct
 >     >> yet another "this time we mean it!" unique identifier.
 > 
 >     st> That's not the point.  We're not going to impose this on
 >     st> senders;
 > 
 > I read the quote as meaning "this time we mean it really is unique",
 > imposing nothing on senders.

Ah.  If so, my reply is "if you want something done right, do it
yourself."  *All robust databases assign a unique ID to each record.*
Why shouldn't a mailing list archive do so?

 > Right.  Maybe that will encourage compliance.  The complexity of
 > catering to brokenness in this instance may be too high a price to
 > impose on the all.

What complexity?  Mailman just does

   msg['X-List-Archive-Received-ID'] = Email.msgid()

(or however the message ID generator is spelled).  After that, it's up
to the archiver whether to do anything with it or not.  I proposed a
way that it could be used; if that's considered too complex, fine.
But simply assigning one is not complex or otherwise very costly.