Re: mailing list archiver chewing patches

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> On Tue, 2010-01-12 at 10:24 +0530, Dave Page wrote:
>> So just to put this into perspective and give anyone paying attention
>> an idea of the pain that lies ahead should they decide to work on
>> this:
>>
>> - We need to import the old archives (of which there are hundreds of
>> thousands of messages, the first few years of which have, umm, minimal
>> headers.
>> - We need to generate thread indexes
>> - We need to re-generate the original URLs for backwards compatibility
>>
>> Now there's encouragement :-)

> Or, we just leave the current infrastructure in place and use a new one
> for all new messages going forward. We shouldn't limit our ability to
> have a decent system due to decisions of the past.

-1. What's the point of having archives? IMO the mailing list archives
are nearly as critical a piece of the project infrastructure as the CVS
repository. We've already established that moving to a new SCM that
fails to preserve the CVS history wouldn't be acceptable. I hardly
think that the bar is any lower for mailing list archives.

Now I think we could possibly skip the requirement suggested above for
URL compatibility, if we just leave the old archives on-line so that
those URLs all still resolve. But if we can't load all the old messages
into the new infrastructure, it'll basically be useless for searching
purposes.

(Hmm, re-reading what you said, maybe we are suggesting the same thing,
but it's not clear. Anyway my point is that Dave's first two
requirements are real. Only the third might not be.)

regards, tom lane