I can think of three ways that users might want deletions to appear:
A) leave the message's file, removing the text between <!-- body="start" -->
and <!-- body="end" --> (probably replacing it with a message saying
"deleted").
B) remove the file, leaving a gap in the msgnums.
C) remove the file, renumber messages after it to remove gap in the msgnums.
I propose to implement option B. It has the disadvantage of breaking code that assumes the next and previous messages can be found by incrementing or decrementing the msgnum. I see something like a dozen places in the hypermail source where modest changes would be needed. Does anyone think the other options should be implemented? I doubt that the way option C invalidates urls is a good idea. I'm unsure whether there's any demand for option A.
Here are the new options I propose to add:
deleted - a list of headers that indicate a message should not produce
an html file if the value is "yes". Defaults to:
"X-Hypermail-Deleted X-No-Archive"
expires - like deleted, but instead of looking for "yes", it looks for a
date which gets compared to the current time. Defaults to "Expires".
Would write a comment such as <!-- expires="19980603101207" --> in
html files for any message with an expiration date in the future.
If the archive is updated only via the incremental update mode, it would
NOT expire messages that were put in the archive before the expires
option is turned on. (For archives with no mbox, created before the
option is implemented, the header won't be available; it's less clear
what should happen if the expires option is turned off in new versions).
delete_msgnum - a list of msgnums to be marked as deleted in the mbox
(if present) using the first entry in the "deleted" option list, and
deleted from the html archive.
-0 "msgnum msgnum" - command line equivalent for delete_msgnum.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Sat 13 Mar 2010 03:46:12 AM GMT GMT