[Mailman-Users] problem with mm.arch

[Mark Sapiro]

David Relson wrote:
>
>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.

Unless you have set ARCHIVE_TO_MBOX = 0 in mm_cfg.py (presumably it's
not -1 or 1 since if it were you'd have no pipermail archives at all),
the archiving process will append each new archived message to the
archives/private/mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox file. bin/arch doesn't do
this because in normal operation it is reading this file to rebuild
the archive.

If I understand correctly what has been done in your case, you
overwrote this file with the equivalent of

cd archives/private
cat mylist/*.txt > mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox

and then ran

path/to/bin/arch --wipe mylist mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox

which is equivalent to just

path/to/bin/arch --wipe mylist

which resulted in a problem because the Date: headers in the *.txt
files for messages that were originally archived with a previous
bin/arch were all the date of the bin/arch run instead of their
original dates.

It also caused a second problem which you may not be aware of or care
about, but the 'cat' caused a reording of the messages in the
mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox file which caused the archive messages to be
numbered differently in the rebuilt archive which invalidates any
saved URLs to archived messages.

You then fixed the first problem by processing the
mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox file with a perl script to put the date from
the "From " separator into the Date: header and reran bin/arch.

This is probably the best you can do at this point, but now, if my
above understanding is correct, you have a
archives/private/mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox file which is complete and
has correct Date: headers. Again, assuming ARCHIVE_TO_MBOX has its
default value of 2, new messages will be appended to this file, so if
in the future you ever need to rebuild the archive, you just use this
file directly and not the individual *.txt files.


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