On January 15, 2002 at 20:43, J C Lawrence wrote:
> Currently, no matter how many messages you add to the end MH folder
> store, the matching MHonArc archive will always assign the same
> filenames to the same messages. This seems reasonable as well as
> extremely useful (it means I can re-gen archives and have all the
> external links to individual messages not break), but can I rely on
> this? I'm about to start some large architectural changes to my
> site and archives which may result in the archives being regenned
> fairly frequently (long story).
>
> Can I reasonably rely on the msg->filename mapping always being
> constant remaining true?
Depends on how the data gets fed into mhonarc.
For MH directories, If any single file in the directory is deleted,
then archive re-creation will have different message numbers for those
message files with a larger numbered filename from the one deleted.
For example, say you had the following files in your MH directory:
1
2
3
4
5
If the directory is passed into MHonArc, the following MHonArc message
numbers will be assigned to them:
1 => 00000
2 => 00001
3 => 00002
4 => 00003
5 => 00004
If you delete message 3 from the MH directory, and recreate the
MHonArc archive, you would get:
1 => 00000
2 => 00001
4 => 00002
5 => 00003
If you will be using the same MH directories as input, and you have
not deleted any files, you should get the same numbers assigned for
each message.
--ewh
