[Mailman-Users] Stitching together archives

[Mark Sapiro]

Spencer Yost wrote:

>About half of my archives were deleted by an over-zealous and under-smart
>system administrator.  Fortunately I have a backup (so this is why you do
>backups!  ) that is only missing a few days of the archives.
>
>The deletion, and backup, took place before I did an upgrade from 2.14 to
>2.15 this weekend.   My question: How do I stitch together the old 2.1.4
>backups with the current set of archives that is 2.1.5.  I also know there
>is some issues with combining archives in general I would like to see some
>discussion on.
>

The real question is do you have the
$prefix/archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file and is it
complete or can you make it complete using your backups.

If so, all you need do is
  $prefix/bin/arch --wipe listname

You can combine several archive .mbox files in two ways. Either combine
the .mbox files into one and do as above or do
  cd $prefix
  bin/mailmanctl stop      <-- only if preserving numbering is an issue
  bin/arch --wipe listname path/to/first/file.mbox
  bin/arch listname path/to/second/file.mbox
  ...
  bin/arch listname        <-- current (default) .mbox is last
  bin/mailmanctl start     <-- only if stopped above

When you combine archives in this way, there may be a numbering issue
in that messages in the new archive are numbered in the order they are
read/processed from the .mbox files. If you have saved links to
archive messages and message numbering changes, the saved links will
fail or will retrieve the wromg message. If you have the complete
listname.mbox file and just rebuild the archive from that, numbering
is not an issue.

You may also find some of the info in
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.003.htp
to be of interest.

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