Stability of pipermail ml archive URLs

[Arseny Solokha]

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.

may I also chime in with a related (to some extent), even though a separate
issue? It seems URL rewriting rules designed to replace old-style

  https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/<list name>/current

URLs pointing to monthly digests to current ones

  https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/<list name>/<year-month>/date.html#end

broke with onset of May. I mean, if I type

  https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/current

I still get

  https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2020-April/date.html#end

(note 2020-April) instead.