Tilman, thanks for those links.
I thought the base-32 encoded hash of Message-Id discussed in [http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Stable+URLs] gives us a straightforward and effective solution to the problem. Ten characters or so should be plenty. This would produce URLs like, [http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2012-August/OHRDQGOX35.html]
We could prefix these with a parent directory that serves as a versioning scheme for our hash, allowing us to create forwarding rules if the permalink rules change in the future. For example (and I have no experience, this might not work), we can generate an ".htaccess" at the root of old archive directories, which redirects each of the old sequential URLs to the new, hashed location.
-Adam
On 08/17/2012 08:00 AM, Tilman Bayer wrote:
On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 4:26 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Guillaume Paumier wrote:
I was told yesterday that the mailman/pipermail archives were broken, in that permalinks were no longer linking to the messages they used to link to (therefore not being "permalinks" at all).
This is pretty devastating. It's difficult to overstate the importance of Mailman archives in documenting Wikimedia's history (or even history before Wikimedia was a concept). I've come across links such as the one at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tim_Starling_Day that I can't even find anywhere in the Mailman archives any longer. :-(
MZMcBride
Many historical Signpost articles are affected as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=piper...
BTW, here's Brion dreaming about a stable archiving system in 2007 ... http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/28993
In the same year, the lead developer of Mailman said that fixing this problem of breaking URLs was "absolutely critical" (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2007-July/019632.html ) and some ideas were thrown around (http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Stable+URLs ), but apparently this huge data integrity problem still hasn't been solved.