[Balug-Admin] BALUG history/archives

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu):

> I did manage to retrieve a fair chunk of older BALUG history/archives.
> 
> Thanks to The Internet Archive, I got what would seem to be much
> of the older mail list materials.  Covering from approximately
> 1997-01-27 through approximately 2001-02-11.  We have the list materials
> from 2001-06-15 going forward. 

Impressive.

If you have (or can get) the mbox files, it's possible to rebuild the
current mailman archives to present the mailing list as a seamless
whole.  The offsetting disadvantage (minor) would be that the URLs of
currently archived postings would change.

I can describe how to go about that, if interested.  Might be best by
telephone. (Basically, you cat together a composite mbox.  Then, you run
the $MAILMAN_HOME/bin/arch utility with appropriate options and
parameters to build the archive.  What then results usually has at least
one bit of garbage at the end of the Web archive:  This results from
misparses of lines _within_ a message body that start with flush-left
text "From " -- misparsing that as the beginning of a new message.  You
then have to track down that line in the mbox and fix it, e.g., by 
prefacing it with ">".  Then, build the archive again.  Repeat until
clean.

If your regex-fu is better than mine, you might be able to spot those
lines programmatically (as distinct from the same string at a legitimate
beginning of a message's headers, in its role as the first few
characters of an envelope header), and fix them before the _first_
build.

> Anyway, I/we will likely make these older materials available (at least
> what we've got or been able to retrieve thus far) in the
> not-too-horribly-distant future.

I very much respect and admire this effort:  It's all too common for the
new Web guys to just discard the entire group's history up to that
point -- and a significant batch of work to later correct that error.