Re: Stability of pipermail ml archive URLs

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please@sourceware.org>]

On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 06:14:55AM -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
>>Such a service is not currently available on sourceware, but it'd be
>>possible to implement: as messages come in, you'd build a database
>>mapping from the Message-ID header to "current Mailman's Pipermail
>>URL".
>
>I was thinking we might be able to trick pipermail (the web archiver
>component) to simply name the message web urls after some function of
>the message-id instead of the sequence number.  Will give this a try
>very shortly.

I just want to go on record as saying that I think this is a bad idea.
We can fix this problem simply without redesigning pipermail.  The
problem that we're seeing is caused by a script that I wrote to migrate
ezmlm to mailman.  The fix for the problem is "Don't run that script".

But, if we are going to make this level of change to pipermail we might
as well go wild and just implement all of the other things that people
want and forget about our supposed desire to use "supported" software.
Changing pipermail to use message-id's rather than sequence numbers
negates the argument that we want to be standard since we likely won't
be able to get this change in upstream.  I doubt that mailman2
developers will want to consider this major a change in a product that
is supposedly close to EOL.

cgf