Adriaan van Os wrote:
By the way, the gpc mailing list archive seems to be changed. I preferred the old archive
Well, thanks. It's always nice to hear so -- especially after it was decomissioned. ;-) While it was active, I rarely got positive feedback, only sometimes complaints. (BTW, I think it was you who complained that the old one displayed email addresses in clear -- the new one mangles them a bit at least.)
Anyway, the thing is, I wrote the old archive program (crystal) for a website for a specific project several years ago which is long done and its website taken offline. So my direct need to support this program exists no more.
Since crystal was written in GPC, it seemed appropriate to use it with the old GPC mailing list (majordomo) which didn't have an archive of its own.
But software is aging and maintenance effort was starting to increase. E.g., a major version upgrade of MySQL required some SQL syntax changes which Benedikt Wildenhain made (but the next upgrade may require further changes). Upgrades of the web server (apache) and email server (exim) so far haven't required changes to crystal, but it can't be ruled out that future upgrades will. And, of course, being written in GPC means that we can't even build it with a current GCC (not to depreciate Waldek's efforts, but I hope it's obvious that I wouldn't install a program on a public web site built with a compiler with major changes (for gcc-4.x) that haven't received much testing apart from running the test suite AFAIK, let alone security auditing).
Furthermore, we (at least me as well as Anja Gerwinski who maintains the mailing lists) have never been very happy with majordomo, so when the GPC web site was moved to a new server (hardware), we decided to take this opportunity to move all mailing lists to mailman. Since mailman has its own archives, it seems logical to use them now and get rid of the maintenance of crystal. As mailman is rather widespread, probably a number of users are used to its interface.
(and it breaks a lot of links).
Indeed, that's a problem, but perhaps we can solve it with redirects.
From the old crystal database, we can extract a mapping (fields "id"
and "msgid" in the "mail" table) between the numbers that appear in the links and Message-IDs (which should be unique). Hopefully, something similar can be done on the mailman side (I don't know its internals, but I suppose it can be found out).
So perhaps with a little scripting it should be possible to provide redirects from the old links to the corresponding mails in the mailman archive. If you, or someone else, would like to try this, please contact Peter (peter@gerwinski.de) first to check the details.
Regards, Frank