Message: 9 Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 16:56:23 +0100 From: Mark Bergsma mark@nedworks.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] New mail servers leave many broken links To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 45A50CA7.4040906@nedworks.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
David Gerard wrote:
On 10/01/07, Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com
wrote:
The transfer of the the mailing list archives
have
resulted in broken links throughout the projects.
Can
this somehow be fixed on the server side? Can we possibily keep copies of all archives up till now
in
both places? If the links themselves have to be
edited
is this something that can be done by a bot? I
don't
think it is a good idea to leave these links as
404
errors.
It's an appallingly bad idea and needs fixing,
yes. Rewrite rule on
mail.wikipedia.org / mail.wikimedia.org ?
What are you talking about? There *is* one in place already, and has always been.
Example, maybe?
-- Mark
mark@nedworks.org
Sorry if I am not describing this well. But on the the wiki's if there is an html link to a post in the mailing list archive it is now broken. For example all the links on this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2007_01_1-7
But these links are all over all the wiki's as part of different disscussions, policies, etc.
Birgitte SB
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Birgitte SB wrote:
Sorry if I am not describing this well. But on the the wiki's if there is an html link to a post in the mailing list archive it is now broken. For example all the links on this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2007_01_1-7
But these links are all over all the wiki's as part of different disscussions, policies, etc.
Ok, so the problem is that there is indeed a redirect from the old address to the new address, but some message article numbers seem to have changed by the rebuild of the archive - at least for this month.
However if I look at LSS for December 2006, those addresses seem to work. Hopefully the same will hold for all or most of the older messages in the archive.
Unfortunately there isn't much we can do here without breaking other stuff. If it's just for January 2007, I guess we'll have to live with it.
Mark Bergsma wrote:
Ok, so the problem is that there is indeed a redirect from the old address to the new address, but some message article numbers seem to have changed by the rebuild of the archive - at least for this month.
However if I look at LSS for December 2006, those addresses seem to work. Hopefully the same will hold for all or most of the older messages in the archive.
Ok maybe I didn't look that well - for previous months you don't seem to get a 404, but the message IDs seem to refer to totally different messages - which is not too helpful.
Sigh...
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Mark Bergsma wrote:
Mark Bergsma wrote:
Ok, so the problem is that there is indeed a redirect from the old address to the new address, but some message article numbers seem to have changed by the rebuild of the archive - at least for this month.
However if I look at LSS for December 2006, those addresses seem to work. Hopefully the same will hold for all or most of the older messages in the archive.
Ok maybe I didn't look that well - for previous months you don't seem to get a 404, but the message IDs seem to refer to totally different messages - which is not too helpful.
The short answer is that Mailman's archiving system sucks; we've had problems sometimes in the past when rebuilding archives and it's pretty annoying.
Since it assigns URLs on the basis of a count of messages from the beginning of the list, a rebuild can change *every number after* some particular weird message which gets processed differently by a new version of the software.
An example I encountered a couple years ago was forwarded messages; the embedded 'From' header got counted as a separate message in earlier versions of Mailman from our olden days, but not by newer versions (or something along those lines), breaking the numbering when the lists got rebuilt after a couple years.
With a lot of tweaking and rebuilding, it is sometimes possible to restore the old numbering by removing or inserting fake messages. :P
Not sure how worth it it is.
(What I'd *prefer* to see is a stable archiving system which generates URLs based on internal properties of the message or an explicitly stored ID number at receive time, so they aren't dependent on what else is in the archive at rebuild time.)
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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