Re: Stability of pipermail ml archive URLs

["Frank Ch. Eigler" <fche@elastic.org>]

Hi -

> https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2020-February/232205.html
> Looking around, the last two months of gcc now have very small
> numbers, but e.g. on gcc-patches the mails have very high numbers like
> 545238.html.  Can pipermail provide stable URLs at all?  We really
> need those, we reference those in commit messages, other mails, bugzilla
> etc.

Argh, that is a problem, sorry.  We get mailman to regenerate web
archives for example in the case of spam that has gone through.  Our
recipe has been to delete the spam from the apropriate .mbox, but this
does renumber things.

The big vs. little numbers are probably an accidental function of
whether the email .mbox files were processed chronologically or not.
I'll tweak the mrefresh script to make sure it's chronological; that
should avoid gross jumps like that.  I believe gcc-patches just wasn't
regenerated for spam removal whereas others have.  There should not be
gross jumps in the future, except we'll have to regenerate everything
one more time. :-(

Small jumps though --- darn, we'd have to do something else with spam
in the mbox, maybe replace it somehow in situ with something else.  Or
catch it so quickly that subsequent URLs aren't archived anywhere
important.

It would be good to have another way of making permanent URLs for
individual messages in mailing list archives.

- FChE