[Mailman-Users] problem with mm.arch

[David Relson]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 12:57:33 -0700
Mark Sapiro wrote:

> David Relson wrote:
> >
> >On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 09:46:06 -0700
> >Mark Sapiro wrote:
> >
> >> 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
> >
> >Complete, except that messages before day 1 (of the mailman era) will
> >be put into directory "month 1" (of the mailman era).
> 
> I understand that's what happened in this case where you rebuilt
> mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox by concatenating all the monthly .txt files.
> What I'm questioning/suggesting is why do this concatenation. If you
> created an initial archive in May of 2004 by running bin/arch against
> some imported/created global mbox format archive, you could have named
> that file mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox and then Mailman would have appended
> new messages to that file so that in April 2005, it would be a
> complete mbox with all messages with correct dates. Then a simple
> 
> bin/arch --wipe mylist

That's what I had hoped to do, but it's not what happened :-)

> 
> Would rebuild the entire archive with correct dates.
> 
> Even if you didn't leave that imported archive mbox as
> mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox, if you kept it somewhere, you could have
> rebuilt the archive now with
> 
> bin/arch --wipe mylist path/to/imported.mbox
> bin/arch mylist
> 
> Which would first build the archive up to May 2004 and then add
> messages since then.
> 
> The point is that the mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox file is kept up to date
> by the archiving process so it alone or possibly it together with an
> imported mbox can always be used to create a new archive. The monthly
> .txt files should only be used as a last resort in case the overall
> mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox is corrupt or unrecoverable.

Mark,

Unfortunately, I don't know the full history of mylist.mbox.  I don't
recall mucking with the mbox file and May 2004 was quite a while ago
and there's no telling.  I don't _think_ I did anything with the mbox
file -- especially since I use the .mbx extension and don't recall
seeing a .mbox file before the recent problems.

I _do_ notice that the messages added via bin/arch haven't been added
to mylist.mbox (which has a Feb date as I write this), which doesn't
sound like the expected behavior.

Regards,

David