[Mailman-Users] merging 2 mailing lists

[Barry S. Finkel]

On 7/6/2015 8:26 AM, Laura Creighton wrote:
> 2 somebodies I know want to merge their mailing lists.  They are
> both lists for recipes for people who have impaired kidney function.
> A complication is that these lists are hosted on different machines,
> with completely different names, etc.  But picking a third name
> and setting things up so that posters to both old names get their
> mail sent to the third place, while receiving a message informing
> them to use the new address seems to work in testing.
>
> The problem is with the archives.  They want to change the footers
> in each of the old list messages to say 'this was posted to old_list,
> use new_list instead if you want to post a new message' and point to
> the new archives.  I can write a script to do that.
>
> But then, having modified the footers they want to store the 2 past
> archives as 1 archive, so that people who search the thing will get
> hits wherever the old article was posted.  I don't see any out-of-the-box
> solutions, am I missing something?
>
> Laura


I am not an expert in Mailman archives, and I do not have a machine
on which to test.  I think that if you take the two mbox archive
files (probably after you have run your footer modification scripts)
and combine them into one file - then you can build the archives of
the new list from this combined file.  I believe (but I may be wrong)
that you do not have to sort the messages in the combined file by date.

What I would do as a test is take the two mbox files, maybe extract
a handful of messages from each (or take the entire files), combine
them, and make an archive for a new test list.

If I remember correctly,

      bin/arch --wipe ...

I do not remember the other parameters, but a search of this list's
archives will find the command.

--Barry Finkel