[Mailman-Users] merging 2 mailing lists

[Mark Sapiro]

On 07/06/2015 07:25 AM, Barry S. Finkel wrote:
> 
> 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.


That's essentially what I would do. I.e. modify the
listname.mbox/listname.mbox archive mbox files to add the desired
footers, concatenate them and use the result as input to 'bin/arch
--wipe' to build the new combined archive.

But sequence does matter. If you concatenate two mboxes and keep the two
parts in sequence, that will be OK. There are two issues with sequence.
One is that the message numbering in the new html archive, and hence
URLs to individual messages, is the overall sequence in the input mbox.
That won't matter in your case, because it's a new archive and no one
has saved URLs to its messages.

The other issue is bin/arch does extra work every time the 'period'
changes. E.g., if archive_volume_frequency is Monthly, each time the
Month/Year changes in the input, extra work is done. If the input is two
big chunks, each of which is in sequence, this won't be noticeable, but
if the input is large and more or less random, bin/arch can take a very
long time to process it.

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