Re: Mail archive indexes are broken, URLs too

Tom Lane wrote:
> When Marc fixed the message-boundary pattern and regenerated the
> archives, many of the existing messages changed URLs because they
> got assigned slightly different numbers.  I notice that the archive
> search engine hasn't yet tracked this change --- if you do a search
> and click on a link to a message, you'll arrive at a message close
> to the one you want but probably not quite it.
>
> Regenerating the archive indexes is presumably not hard, but there's
> a bigger problem: for awhile now many of us have been in the habit
> of citing old discussions by archive URLs.  All those links are now
> broken too, and I can't think of any easy way to fix them.  And then
> there's Google etc.
>
> I wonder if it'd be better to revert the regeneration of the archives,
> and only apply the new message-boundary pattern to future messages.

Agreed.  There have been no changes since we discussed this.

The best proposal was to renumber the newly-found items to the end of
the numeric range for the pre-July 2006 archives, and to properly number
July 2006 and later archives.  And this date range has to be enbedded in
the archive script so if it is ever run again, this behavior continues
to happen.

The longer we take to fix this, the more likely that people are creating
URL's that refer to the existing pre-July 2006 numbering which should
change.  It needs to be fixed quickly.

And we can't just leave it alone because old archive emails have URLs
that point to now-incorrect numbers, and there is no good way to fix
that everywhere are emails are archived.

--
  Bruce Momjian   bruce@momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB    http://www.enterprisedb.com

  + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +