Do we really need the ezmlm mailing list archives?

Do we really need the ezmlm mailing list archives?

[Christopher Faylor]

/sourceware/qmail is filling up and we'll either have to extend the
partition or delete archives.  I am wondering why we are going to the
effort of storing the ezmlm archives.  We now store the archives in four
different places -- we store them as html for searching, we store most
of them as raw text for downloading, we store them as ftpable archives,
and we store them in the ezmlm directories where people can (rather
inconveniently) download them via ezmlm commands.

Given how often I suspect people try to download things using ezmlm
I wonder if we should forego archving like this from now on.  It
will reclaim quite a bit of disk space, if we decide that we don't
need to allow people to download archives using ezmlm.

cgf

Re: Do we really need the ezmlm mailing list archives?

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> Given how often I suspect people try to download things using ezmlm
> I wonder if we should forego archving like this from now on.  It
> will reclaim quite a bit of disk space, if we decide that we don't
> need to allow people to download archives using ezmlm.

I personally found it helpful to access ezmlm warnings in those cases
where one of my mail severs had problems and qmail/ezmlm sent a list
of messages it hadn't been able to deliver.

That said, I certainly agree with removing those ezmlm archives older
than one month or so.

Gerald
-- 
Gerald Pfeifer (Jerry)   gerald@pfeifer.com   http://www.pfeifer.com/gerald/

Re: Do we really need the ezmlm mailing list archives?

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> /sourceware/qmail is filling up and we'll either have to extend the
> partition or delete archives.  I am wondering why we are going to the
> effort of storing the ezmlm archives.  We now store the archives in four
> different places -- we store them as html for searching, we store most
> of them as raw text for downloading, we store them as ftpable archives,
> and we store them in the ezmlm directories where people can (rather
> inconveniently) download them via ezmlm commands.

The ezmlm archives are useful for lists without web archives (such as
gcc-maintainers).  There are also some with web archives but without
ftpable mbox archives (such as gcc-cvs-wwwdocs, though I don't know why).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm@polyomino.org.uk

Re: Do we really need the ezmlm mailing list archives?

[Jason Molenda]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 02:29:40PM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> > Given how often I suspect people try to download things using ezmlm
> > I wonder if we should forego archving like this from now on.  It
> > will reclaim quite a bit of disk space, if we decide that we don't
> > need to allow people to download archives using ezmlm.


They're really useful when the /www partition fills up and archving
doesn't work -- I've reconstructed borked archives from the ezmlm
archives a number of times.

> That said, I certainly agree with removing those ezmlm archives older
> than one month or so.


I'd concur.  I've never used the ezmlm archives greater than 1-2
months old.  You'd be safest to make it 3 months for the benefit
of quarterly archives.

If the disk space were easily available, I'd prefer to keep them
for nothing more than redundancy's sake, but I won't shed even a
small tear if older ezmlm archives are removed.

Another option - which I've done in the past - is to .tar.bz2 old
archives.  They still take up disk space, but less than they would
otherwise.  This is done by hand right now, though.  (it's not hard
to envision a script that would run monthly, tar.bz2 up directories
that haven't been modified in the past month, and remove them.)

J

Re: Do we really need the ezmlm mailing list archives?

[Jeffrey A Law]

On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 23:04, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> /sourceware/qmail is filling up and we'll either have to extend the
> partition or delete archives.  I am wondering why we are going to the
> effort of storing the ezmlm archives.  We now store the archives in four
> different places -- we store them as html for searching, we store most
> of them as raw text for downloading, we store them as ftpable archives,
> and we store them in the ezmlm directories where people can (rather
> inconveniently) download them via ezmlm commands.
> 
> Given how often I suspect people try to download things using ezmlm
> I wonder if we should forego archving like this from now on.  It
> will reclaim quite a bit of disk space, if we decide that we don't
> need to allow people to download archives using ezmlm.
I'd suggest only keeping the most recent few months -- typically
what I've done/seen is downloading of a few missed messages due
to end-site mail problems.

Jeff

Re: Do we really need the ezmlm mailing list archives?

[Christopher Faylor]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 05:38:54AM -0700, Jason Molenda wrote:
>Another option - which I've done in the past - is to .tar.bz2 old
>archives.  They still take up disk space, but less than they would
>otherwise.  This is done by hand right now, though.  (it's not hard
>to envision a script that would run monthly, tar.bz2 up directories
>that haven't been modified in the past month, and remove them.)

I've done that and I've also compressed the older, individual archive
files.  IIRC, there is even an ezmlm patch that allows you to use
files that way.

cgf

Re: Do we really need the ezmlm mailing list archives?

[Christopher Faylor]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 05:38:54AM -0700, Jason Molenda wrote:
>They're really useful when the /www partition fills up and archving
>doesn't work -- I've reconstructed borked archives from the ezmlm
>archives a number of times.

I just wanted to point out that we'll soon be using the /www archives
to recreate the ezmlm archives if we don't do something about this
soon.

cgf

Re: Do we really need the ezmlm mailing list archives?

[Christopher Faylor]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 10:28:48AM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 05:38:54AM -0700, Jason Molenda wrote:
>>Another option - which I've done in the past - is to .tar.bz2 old
>>archives.  They still take up disk space, but less than they would
>>otherwise.  This is done by hand right now, though.  (it's not hard to
>>envision a script that would run monthly, tar.bz2 up directories that
>>haven't been modified in the past month, and remove them.)
>
>I've done that and I've also compressed the older, individual archive
>files.  IIRC, there is even an ezmlm patch that allows you to use files
>that way.

Compressing all but the last three months of certain archives seems to
have produced a nice result on /sourceware/qmail.  This holds off the
need to make any other decisions about the archives for a while, I
guess.

Although compressing files less than 4096 bytes in size is just a waste
of CPU for this purpose, I chose to compress everything, just for some
foolish consistency.

cgf