On Oct 26, 2017, at 10:01, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote:

> Pipermail is *horrible*

Pipermail also has a fatal flaw, and we have been hit by it several times in 
our past.  It’s fundamental to Pipermail’s design and can’t be fixed.  
Fortunately, HyperKitty was designed and implemented correctly so it doesn’t 
suffer this flaw.

Pipermail indexes messages sequentially, and if you ever regenerate the archive 
from the source mbox, it’s is almost guaranteed that your messages will get 
different URLs.  Worse, you can’t even automate a mapping from new URLs to old 
URLs.  This is especially likely in archives that go back as far as python-dev 
does, because there was a bug back in the day where even the source mbox file 
got corrupted, where the separator between messages was broken.  We tried to 
implement a fix for that, but it’s a heuristic and it’s not perfect.

We say that Pipermail does not have “stable urls”.  Thankfully HyperKitty does! 
 So even if you regenerate the HyperKitty archive, your messages will end up 
with the same URLs.

This let’s us implement Archived-At stably, and the algorithm at [1] even lets 
us pre-calculate the URL, so we can even include the URL to where the message 
*will* be once it’s archived, even without talking to HyperKitty, or any of the 
other archivers that are enabled (and support the algorithm of course).

So HyperKitty is miles ahead of Pipermail in design and implementation.  Sure 
it’s different, but people also forget how really buggy Pipermail was for a 
long time.  (And trust me, you really don’t even want to look at the code. ;)

Cheers,
-Barry

[1] https://wiki.list.org/DEV/Stable%20URLs

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