[Mailman-Users] Importing archives again

[Brad Knowles]

At 10:53 AM -0600 4/19/07, Ivan Van Laningham wrote:

>  There's a FAQ entry on importing archives.  However, if the
>  instructions are followed, the existing list.mbox would be overwritten
>  with an old archive.

No, I don't think so.  It just reads from the specified mbox file, or 
from the default mbox file if you don't give it a different one.  The 
"cooked" text & HTML indexes will be rebuilt during the process, but 
the "raw" mbox file should be read by the process, but otherwise 
untouched.

Of course, if you want to be extra careful, you could always copy the 
mbox file to a backup location, before doing any work with it.

>                        That surely cannot be right.  Can I put it
>  someplace else in order to import it?  Shouldn't I lock the list while
>  running bin/arch?

In my experience, that's not necessary.  And I've imported mboxes 
that were larger than 2GB in size, when rebuilding the archives for 
some ultra-busy mailing lists hosted on python.org.

>  I've got seven years worth of archives to do for as many lists, so I'd
>  really like to get this right.  I'd be happy to edit the FAQ once I
>  know the proper steps.  (And if I missed the answers in my admittedly
>  cursory search of the mailman-users archives, they should still be
>  inserted into the FAQ.)

So far as I know, the FAQ is pretty complete on this topic.  If 
there's anything missing, please let us know.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>