On Aug 30, 2009, at 10:01 PM, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
I've seen some mentions from the website team before about doing
regenerating
the mail archives, resulting in the message numbers in the URL's
changing, but
thought it was a rare event, not a regular one.
Can the website team comment on the expected stability of mail
archive URL's?
Where does the website team suggest we refer users to for things
like the
release notes of new OpenSolaris /dev builds, if neither the main
website
nor the mail archives have stable URL's? Is there any site in the
opensolaris.org infrastructure that provides stable URL's for such
things?
Do we need to request a new site that just provides stable URL's that
redirect to the unstable ones?
I've already answered Mr. Comay, but since the water has been chummed,
I'll go ahead and explain it again. Mailman uses pipermail for the
archives which is a simple, unsophisticated and mostly undocumented
archiver that, like a Yugo, gets you there but might decapitate you if
you hit something.
I have, in the recent past, done a full rebuild of some list archives
where I have removed spam, mostly from the 2006-2007 timeframe which
will renumber the messages following the removed spam because it has
no way of keeping the numbering consistent between builds. I've worked
hard to take the OSS list archives off the top results for 'nude
preteen sex' and some other stuff about tubes and Miley Cyrus. I added
the 404 search page and feed google a new site index to help speed the
reindexing and ease the pain.
Late last week, I fixed the date string on the rss feed code and added
a syndication link to all the listinfo pages. In wanting to generate
the rss.xml file for the slower lists, I invoked the mailman archiver
which...to make a long story short, doesn't to the logical or expected
thing in that it doesn't refresh the existing archive, rather, it
builds a completely new one on top of it starting with the last
numbered message +1. This is either an under-documented feature or a
bug as I can't really figure why anyone might want to do such a thing.
It'll keep on accreting versions of the archive for every instance of
'arch' you execute against a lists' archive as well.
WRT to stable URLs...in this particular instance (read - please,
nothing about the website transition redirection furor), it was due to
poor documentation and my trusting the software to do the right or
expected thing.
To undo the mess, I rebuilt them all on Friday night which means that
the numbering should be back to where it was before the debacle.
Please do keep in mind that this has nothing to do with the main site
transition.
e.
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