[Mailman-Users] fixing a "reordered" archive

[Mark Sapiro]

On 06/12/2013 12:10 PM, Matthew Needham wrote:
> A couple of weeks ago I moved all of my mailing lists to a new subdomain. So far, everything has worked great, but I've now discovered that the archive message numbering has changed. For example, I'm referring to the numbers "006782" at the end of a URL like http://lists.hdfgroup.org/pipermail/hdf-forum_lists.hdfgroup.org/2013-May/006782.html.


So you rebuilt the archive with bin/arch --wipe and the messages in the
input mbox were not in the same sequence in which they were added to the
original archive. The number in the nnnnnn.html file name is the
sequence number of when it was added.


> I believe that this happened because after the list was first created in mailman (in 2009), older archives were added using "arch <listname> <older.mbox>. My hypothesis is that if I were able to separate the current mbox into the messages that existed before older.mbox was archived, and those that were added afterwards, I could then rebuild the archive in the original order so that the message numbering would be preserved.


Yes. You should actually reorder the .mbox into the initial archived
messages followed by the older.mbox messages followed by the messages
after older.mbox was added. Then rebuild with bin/arch --wipe to get the
original sequence, and since the single .mbox is now in the sequence you
want, the problem is avoided in the future.


> As best as I can tell, there's no way for me to determine which messages were in the archive before older.mbox was added. Is there a way? 


If you still have the old archive (maybe on a backup), the first message
in that archive from older.mbox has number nnnnnn. Message nnnnnn-1 is
the last of the messages that were in the archive when older.mbox was added.


> Alternatively, is these a better way to preserve all of the links that are now sitting in Google, various third party archives, sundry word documents, and user mailboxes?


No.


> Or is this a fool's errand I should abandon posthaste?


Perhaps.


> In case it helps, before migrating the lists I made tarballs of everything, so I still have access to the archives before they were rebuilt.


Then you have the means to determine the breakpoint so it should be doable.

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