[Mailman-Users] problem with mm.arch

[David Relson]

Greetings,

I think I've encountered a gotcha with mm.arch.

In May 2004 I brought up mailman with list archives (from another
program).  All went well, AFAICT.  A few days ago the listserver's
hard drive crashed and I rebuilt the list archives from the monthly
mbox files.  I was very surprised to see that the newly created
archives had zillions of messages in the 2004-May directories and
nothing for prior months.

Looking at the YYYY-Month.txt mbox files, I saw that all messages
earlier than May 2004 had "Date: Mon May  3 hh:mm:dd 2004" lines,
i.e. the Date: line shows when mm.arch is run.

This seems wrong.  From mm.arch's help message and the mbox file
format, it seems that rebuilding with:

  cat mylist/*.txt > mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox
  mm.arch --wipe --quiet mylist mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox

should produce the same archive as when you start.

It seems that my ideas for rebuilding don't quite fit with reality.
What am I overlooking?

Thanks.

David

P.S.  My solution to this problem was a perl script that extracts the
date from the "^From " line and puts it in the Date: line.  It's not a
wonderful solution, but it works.  (If I knew python better, I'd write
fix.archive.dates.py to handle this situation).