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.