[sf-lug] Jim Stockford (and/or others?): Do you have old list emails?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jim Stockford (jim at well.com):

> what time period?

As to SF-LUG's mailing list, any postings before Dec. 26, 2005.


I'm pretty certain the archive is 100% complete since December 26 (heh,
my least favourite day of the entire year for personal historical
reasons), 2005, when I provided SF-LUG with a home after its initial
mailing list elsewhere fell victim to some accident.  (ISTR I never
heard _exactly_ what happened to the initial mailing list.

For possible interest, here's my first posting after the re-hosting on
my server (on New Year's Eve, 2005):
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2005q4/000003.html

I see that, at that time, it was expected that the new home I offered to
SF-LUG's mailing list would be temporary until the group got back fully
onto its own feet.  (But y'all are perfectly welcome to stay, just to be
clear.)  Quoting:

  First, just a few words about the current situation, since we-all
  simply popped up on linuxmafia.com like mushrooms in the spring.  Jim and a
  friend are still busy working on restoring the _real_ SF-LUG mailing
  list and Web site, and I believe are considering hosting options.
  Meanwhile, I offered to give the mailing list a temporary home on my
  Mailman-equipped Linux server, linuxmafia.com.  (Yr. welcome.  Glad to
  help.) 
  [...]
  SF-LUG is welcome to use my machine's facilities as long as it
  wants, but I anticipate that we'll want to move it to SF-LUG's _own_
  machine in good time.


I _still_ am curious about what happened, Jim.  To the original mailing
list incarnation chez vous, that is.

Anyway, unless I'm missing something, the only traffic missing in the
SF-LUG mailing list's case is anything prior to the linuxmafia.com
incarnation, i.e., prior to 2005-12-26.

Any of that pre-Dec. 26, 2005, that anyone happens to still have, in any
format, I'll be glad to figure out how to merge into the existing
archive.  Anyone who still has copies, talk to me _offlist_, please.


FWIW, I wax hot and cold about whether completism about re-finding
and merging old mailing list traffic is worth the trouble.  Honestly,
hardly anyone bothers to read old LUG postings.  On the other hand, it's
the history of Linux user groups, and IMO it should be a point of pride
that we don't throw away our work, and protect it.

One place where I did work making sure early LUG history isn't lost is
at Silicon Valley Linux User Group.  The SVLUG mailing list _Web_
archive started at 1998 for a long time -- which is certainly an
impressively long history.  However, as I went through old records, I
remembered that 1998 was when the SVLUG mailing list's _second_
incarnation started life, when SVLUG converted over from the majordomo
mailing list manager software to Mailman.  Thing is, Mailman provides a
_Web_ archive by default.  Majordomo archived old postings for each
hosted mailing list to a cumulative _mbox_ file, but archive access wasn't 
Web-accessible.

In short, I rediscovered the discontinued majordomo-hosted SVLUG mbox
file covering the period 1997-1998.  _So_, I soon thereafter merged the
old majordomo-managed mbox into the later and much larger
Mailman-managed mbox, and the regenerated the Web archive.  Now, SVLUG's
mailing list traffic is on the Web going all the way back to 1997.

That may not be all that pragmatically useful, but there's a certain
geeky grandeur to it, I'd say.