On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 11:48:18AM +0200, Thomas Schwinge wrote: >On 2020-05-06T10:44:46-0400, "Frank Ch. Eigler via Gcc" ><gcc@gcc.gnu.org> wrote: >>>Can pipermail provide stable URLs at all? We really need those, we >>>reference those in commit messages, other mails, bugzilla etc. > >>It would be good to have another way of making permanent URLs for >>individual messages in mailing list archives. > >Look up by Message-ID? ><http://mid.mail-archive.com/20200506141139.GJ2375@tucnak>, for >example. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message-ID>, etc. The >idea is that for all practical purposes, Message-IDs are "sufficiently >unique". (Compare conceptually to the Git SHA-1 hashes.)
IMO, we're making way too big a deal out of this. The message archives are changing because we are resequencing them. Mailman doesn't, AFAIK, take it upon itself to randomly renumber them. fche and cgf have been renumbering them when we remove spam. If we stopped doing that there would be no issue. When we were using ezmlm, I was careful not to remove message files when dealing with spam. We haven't been that careful with mailman and, so, we're seeing problems. If we just changed the way that we deal with spam to keep the message around but blank it out, we wouldn't have this problem. In addition, when I was migrating the mail archives from ezmlm to mailman I came across a number of cases where the same message-id was used in two messages. Possibly it was someone just bouncing email or maybe it was something else. Maybe it's a corner case but we wouldn't have to worry about this at all if we just used mailman's current numbering and didn't ever take it upon ourselves to rescan the archives. cgf
