Re: adding new messages to prior hypermail archive

From: Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason <jmm_at_umich.edu_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 21:17:21 -0400
Message-ID: <360C40A1.A8FAF28C_at_umich.edu>

Charles and Gordon offered helpful suggestions. However, I think there is a problem.

Here is what I'm trying to do: I have an existing Hypermail archive (from 1.02) with 467 messages already in it. I do *NOT* have the original mailbox file for it.

I now have 65 new messages in a mailbox that I want to add.

I've tried a standard run, as Gordon suggested (those are Gordon's paths):

/home/gordon/bin/hypermail \
-b "http://cusidnet.anadas.com/" \
-a "http://cusidnet.anadas.com/" \
-m "/home/gordon/mail/cusid" \
-l "CUSIDnet Web Mirror" \
-d "/home/gordon/www/cusidnet/fall1998/" \
-c "/home/gordon/bin/.cusidnethyprc" > /dev/null

That had the following result: The new index files overwrote the existing index files, and showed the information for the 65 *new* messages but no listings for the 467 original messages. However, the archive in fact contained the 467 html files for the original messages, but did *not* contain files for any of the new messages. (Click on New #1 in the index, and it goes to file 0000.html which is Old #1.)

Then I tried what Charles suggested: I inserted 467 "dummy" messages in my mailbox file so that Hypermail could count down those and only add the "new" messages. That *almost* worked. The message files were correctly created: an addition 65 nnnn.html files were added to the archive. However, the original 467 message entries in the index were overwritten with the header information from the 467 dummy messages. So my index files are now useless....

Obviously, the solution could be to chop the 65 new messages and deliver them one at a time to Hypermail for a single message append. (Can someone suggest an easy way to script that?) However, shouldn't Hypermail be able to do this? Perhaps have a switch for "append to existing archive" when we have a new mbox file but have lost the mbox for the original archive? (Likewise, a way to merge hypermail archives without having the original mboxes?)

thanks,
jmm

--

Prof. Jeffrey MacKie-Mason       http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jmm/
Dept. of Economics                                     jmm_at_umich.edu
   and School of Information               +1 (734) 647-4856 (voice)
University of Michigan                     +1 (734) 764-2475   (fax)

Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Received on Sat 26 Sep 1998 03:23:06 AM GMT