launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Aug 11, 2009, at 12:40 PM, Karl Fogel wrote:
> The important thing is redirecting from the old archives to the new
> archives (so that old links still "work").
>
> There could easily be a "This list has moved" button, that anyone with
> admin privs on the list could use.  Barry, does that sound sane enough
> to file a bug for?  (And then I'd solicit on launchpad-dev@ to see if
> anyone wants to try it, as it's probably not that hard, right?)
>
> What I'm envisioning is an Ajaxy window popping up and offering two
> choices:
>
>  - When someone tries to visit a message in this archive, show a page
>    telling them where the list lives now, or
>
>  - When someone tries to visit a message in this archive, redirect to
>    the same message or thread number, but under this new URL: [    ]

The latter will be difficult.  Contrary to popular belief, MHonArc  
doesn't have guaranteed stable urls.  It's close though, and certainly  
closer than Pipermail.  MHonArc maintains a mapping from Message-ID to  
url so as long as that database file is maintained, the regenerated  
archives will have the same url.  There's no such guarantee if the  
archives are regenerated on a different host -- in that case I think  
you'll have no clue where the message ends up.

(Aside: I have a proposal to fix this for any archiver/mlm that  
supports RFC 5064.  Mailman 3 will be the first mlm that I know of to  
support that, but as of yet, neither Pipermail nor MHonArc supports it.)

It's worse than that too, because you don't even know what archiver  
the new host would be using.  There's no commonality between urls  
Pipermail and MHonArc generate for example.

But in any case, I agree that it would not be difficult to add a link  
pointing to the new archive's base url, which could just as well be  
user given.  In that case, I think the team overview page should say  
something prominent in the 'Mailing List' section.  There should be a  
big red blotch that says "This mailing list has moved here (offsite)"  
and keep the link to the legacy archive in Launchpad.

And yep, that should be a pretty easy bug to fix, so it would be neat  
if someone on launchpad-dev wants to take it on.  Please do file a bug  
and I'll be happy to sponsor a community member to take this on.

-Barry

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