[Mailman-Users] problem with mm.arch

[Mark Sapiro]

David Relson wrote:
>
>I think I've encountered a gotcha with mm.arch.

I'm confused. do you mean bin/arch or are you talking about some older
Mailman that I don't know about?

>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.


Yes. It appears that when an archive is built with bin/arch, the Date:
header in the YYYY-Month.txt files is the date that bin/arch is run.
That surprised me too.


>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.

My question is why are you using the above process to create a global
mylist.mbox file instead of just using the existing one.

If you built your archive initially by creating a
mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox file with your imported archives and then
running bin/arch. Then the archiver would continue to append new
messages to mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox and this will always be a complete
archive that can be used as input to bin/arch --wipe


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


Actually, I am surprised that what you did had this result. I thought
the bin/arch process used the date from the "From " line and not the
Date: header. I thought I remembered from my archive import struggles
that the date had to be correct in the "From " line.


>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).


That would probably be useful, and one to put the address and date from
the From: and Date: into the "From " would help with some archive
import situations.


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