Subject: Re: adding new messages to prior hypermail archive

From: "Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2000 21:17:21 -0400

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/fall2000/" \
-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                                     [email-masked]
   and School of Information               +1 (734) 647-4856 (voice)
University of Michigan                     +1 (734) 764-2475   (fax)
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

---

From: [email-masked] (Charles Hall)
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2000 21:45:27 -0400

Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason wrote:
> 
> Then I tried what Charles suggested...  However, the original 467 message
> entries in the index were overwritten with the 467 dummy messages.  So

Ouch! I hope you can recover from this. I didn't realize. Sorry.

> Perhaps have a switch for "append to existing archive" when we have a new
> mbox file

Yes, Yes! I need this functionality too. I prefer not to add messages
one at a time through the day as Hypermail would go re-indexing over and
over again, so I let my mail collect till the end of the month, and run
hypermail once nightly. Since there's no append function, Hypermail has
to churn through all that month's mail each night. If I could append, I
could erase the mailbox each night and only process that day's mail.

MHonArc has this feature, but I believe it keeps a small database to
remember what's been done before. Perhaps such info could be hidden in
the indexes as HTML comments??

--
Charles Hall
Raleigh, NC