[Mailman-Users] Rebuilding the Archive mbox File

[Mark Sapiro]

Barry Finkel wrote:
>
>I have a question about list archives.  I have a list that I
>converted from Majordomo to Mailman in July, 2007.  I was helping
>one of the list owners in managing the list, and I went to the list
>archives.  The web page has all of the combined archives that I copied
>from Majordomo; they go back to May, 1996.  When I went to the Mailman
>file
>
>     /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox
>
>that file contains only the last two postings - Jul 2007 and
>Feb 2008.


So, apparently, you initialized the archive with

 bin/arch --wipe LISTNAME /path/to/majordomo_archive_mbox

but you never added anything to

 /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox



>How do I rebuild the
>
>     LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox
>
>file?  I have the collected mbox file from Majordomo, and I can easily
>pre-pend it to the current LISTNAME.mbox file.  Is that all I have to
>do?


Yes. Or No. The LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox file is maintained as a
kind of backup and is only actually used if you rebuild the archive
with bin/arch.

The safest thing is to prepend the majordomo mbox to
LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox. Then in the future, you could rebuild the
entire archive with

  bin/arch --wipe LISTNAME

The alternative is to not combine the two files and to remember that
rebuilding the archive is a two step process

 bin/arch --wipe LISTNAME /path/to/majordomo_archive_mbox
 bin/arch LISTNAME

to initialize the archive from majordomo_archive_mbox and then add the
posts from the default LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox.

I recommend the former so you don't need to remember the two step
process.

>Or do I need to run
>
>     bin/arch --wipe


Not at this time.

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