Re: Mail archive indexes are broken, URLs too

On Jul 16, 2006, at 2:43 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> 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' ...

This is a problem for most mailing lists, but I think it's a critical
one for us since we depend very, very heavily on the archives.

Can we change the lists so that they will generate a UUID and add it
to message headers, and then allow the archive software to key off of
that?
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461