SherLok Merfy wrote:
On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Paul N. Lee wrote: (...)
Even uncompressed as plain text, the whole FractInt Discussion List from 1997 to present is only about 65-MB (which is only about 24-MB in the .ZIP format).
I'm glad that my guessing is only off by half. Sizes like that tend to be unmanagable under DOS. The remaining question is what format the zipfile should expand to. One single mail file? Divided into months? A Database?
My inclination is the single mail file for portability, although that _might_ break some of the smaller DOS internet clients like NetTamer (I've never tried it for anything like that size, and it's not even on my hard-drive at the moment, but it's usable, perhaps as low water mark).
I've only been wet behind the ears (and hot under the collar) with Linux for a year, so I'm not sure what to think of David's exclusion of MySql. Storing the messages in a format for Structured Query Language might be just what some Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Mathematics would order..
Perhaps it could be done with a script that would turn the mail file into that databasing format, but don't expect that to be rendered any time soon, unless it happens to be old hat to someone on the list.
I think it better to turn the mail archives into a browseable set of HTML pages. That would break them down into manageable sizes, organize them by date, topic, etc, maybe. IIRC, there are Perl scripts that can break a mail archive into HTML pages. Not old hat to me, but I've run into the results of such scripts many times when searching on Google. David gnome@hawaii.rr.com