Re: Discourse proposal status

[David Wright]

On Mon 06 Mar 2023 at 04:18:17 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote:
> Andrew Bernard <andrew.bernard@mailbox.org> writes:
> 
> > Well you can dynamically increase CPU or RAM or both on Digitalocean
> > that I use. You can do it on a temporary basis - but I'm not sure if
> > you get charged for a month or on a strict time basis, it's hard to
> > find out!. It's not a matter of needing a separate system. My only
> > issue is that I am very financially constrained and I can't afford the
> > experiment.
> >
> > But the bigger fish to fry is the issue with the irregularities in the
> > mbox archives. I need to study this in depth before trying a load. I
> > did have the same problem with similar erratic mbox archives quite
> > some years ago but I can't easily recall the solution. Probably just a
> > more refined regex to pick up the 'From:' delimiters.
> 
> There isn't really much finesse involved.  Messages start at the pattern
> "^From ".  Any "From " inside of a message that would end up at the
> start of a line is changed to ">From ", so the pattern "^From " should
> be foolproof regarding splitting into messages.

I think this is rather dated. Most modern MUAs, including your own
from Sat, 25 Feb 2023 16:29:18 +0100, aren't escaping Froms any more.
The cached copy (sent via IMAP) is clean, and any mboxes I copy it to,
all contain:

  > =E2=80=A6 and I=E2=80=99ll probably get yelled at for top-posting as well=
   ;-)
  
  From a practical workflow perspective, I would much rather do all of my
  reading using a single keyboard driven interface and application than

OTOH, the digests contain:

  > … and I’ll probably get yelled at for top-posting as well ;-)
  
  >From a practical workflow perspective, I would much rather do all of my
  reading using a single keyboard driven interface and application than

as does the web page:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2023-02/msg00500.html

I haven't checked what the ?monthly mboxes contain, but I would try
using a regex that includes matching the date at the end of the
From line (here deliberately offset):

  From lil…ser-bounces+lilylis=l….uk@gnu.org Sat Feb 25 09:29:53 2023

because whatever is writing these mboxes should be using a consistent
format for these.

Cheers,
David.