oslist will end soon -- it's time to deliberate, decide and act

[Harold Shinsato]

Hi Raffi,

You're welcome. Thanks for insisting that I take a closer look. Bottom  
line - no - this is not a problem and I don't think we need to process  
more messages first. The conversion is working perfectly. But there is  
something to consider.

The ListServ software collects the messages as they come in and  
creates a separate archive file for each month. Looking over the 54  
messages that Michael Herman posted online to  
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist.log9904 there's a message  
definitely marked as if it were from June 1999. So if you take the  
messages at their word - the message is really from June 1999. So the  
conversion did not introduce any errors. (You can check this yourself  
at Michael's link.)

But based on the context, the one message with the June date stamp  
looks like the person who sent it had put an invalid time stamp on  
their message. I get messages like this sometimes from people who  
don't set the clock on their computer properly.

The Mailman software does not collect the messages into separate files  
for each month. Mailman stores the archived messages all in a single  
mbox file. So the date sorting is very dependent on the timestamp on  
the messages being accurate to sort them properly.

So even though the conversion happened properly - it might be  
worthwhile going over all the ListServ archives and making a guess at  
the correct timestamp. The message was written somewhere between April  
17 and April 20, 1999 based on the message thread evidence. Hopefully  
it didn't happen that often, as it's a bit of detective work for each  
message.

      Happy Holidays!
      Harold



On 12/24/10 5:10 PM, Raffi Aftandelian wrote:
> Harold, thanks for this. I'm really grateful that you have taken this time,
> along with Michael Herman, to research a post-Boise home for OSlist.
>
> And just to clarify:
>
> You're saying that in your test run you converted one month, April 1999. And
> that you're confident that the stray message from June 1999 (which isn't
> really from June 1999) should not be an indication of a problem?
>
> I don't know if you'd have the chance to do so, I'm wondering if you  
> think it would be worthwhile to convert a few more months just to  
> make sure that
> this conversion would work?
>
> happy holidays and belated yalda!
>
> appreciatively,
> Raffi
>

*
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