Re: Mail archive indexes are broken, URLs too

On Sun, 16 Jul 2006, Tom Lane wrote:

> When Marc fixed the message-boundary pattern and regenerated the
> archives, many of the existing messages changed URLs because they
> got assigned slightly different numbers. I notice that the archive
> search engine hasn't yet tracked this change --- if you do a search
> and click on a link to a message, you'll arrive at a message close
> to the one you want but probably not quite it.
>
> Regenerating the archive indexes is presumably not hard, but there's
> a bigger problem: for awhile now many of us have been in the habit
> of citing old discussions by archive URLs. All those links are now
> broken too, and I can't think of any easy way to fix them. And then
> there's Google etc.
>
> I wonder if it'd be better to revert the regeneration of the archives,
> and only apply the new message-boundary pattern to future messages.

Nope, for one simple reason ... if, for some reason, at some point in the
future, we have to regenerate everything anyway (ie. the last time we did
a major template change for the archives), all the #'ng is going to end up
reverting back to what it is now ... so we'd only be 'delaying the
inevitable' ...

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
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