[sf-lug] two-page treatise :-) ... mailing list migration ...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):

> And the list migration went well, quickly, and smoothly.

Quite well done.

I meant to mention to you on balug-admin that you really don't need to
do the emergency-moderation thing, because it's less necessary to do a
strict 'flag day' cutover than you probably are assuming.

Again, citing as an example when I cut over the Skeptic mailing list
from jhu.edu's Sympa instance to linuxmafia.com's Mailman one, the
mailing list was indeed active in both places during an overlap period
of several days (until the Johns Hopkins people chose to turn it off,
which they didn't coordinate with me).  I just collected the messages in
subscriber form.  When JHU finally shut off the Sympa instance, I just
extracted the last bit of traffic from there into a separate mbox, 
and (I think) lightly edited them to make them not specific to me as
subscriber, and then added those to linuxmafia.com's (as yet small)
cumulative mbox and rebuilt the Web archive.  It worked great.

I actually also was able to fetch (before Sympa service was shut off) 
the prior two years of postings from Sympa in mbox format via mail, and
merged those into Mailman's mbox, too.  

Merging mboxes is just a matter of cat'ing them.  (Of course, keep a
backup copy of the mbox before you start, just in case things go
catawumpus.)