On January 15, 2002 at 20:43, J C Lawrence wrote:
Currently, no matter how many messages you add to the end MH folder
store, the matching MHonArc archive will always assign the same
filenames to the same messages. This seems reasonable as well as
extremely useful (it means I can re-gen archives and have all the
external links to individual messages not break), but can I rely on
this? I'm about to start some large architectural changes to my
site and archives which may result in the archives being regenned
fairly frequently (long story).
Can I reasonably rely on the msg->filename mapping always being
constant remaining true?
Depends on how the data gets fed into mhonarc.
For MH directories, If any single file in the directory is deleted,
then archive re-creation will have different message numbers for those
message files with a larger numbered filename from the one deleted.
For example, say you had the following files in your MH directory:
1
2
3
4
5
If the directory is passed into MHonArc, the following MHonArc message
numbers will be assigned to them:
1 => 00000
2 => 00001
3 => 00002
4 => 00003
5 => 00004
If you delete message 3 from the MH directory, and recreate the
MHonArc archive, you would get:
1 => 00000
2 => 00001
4 => 00002
5 => 00003
If you will be using the same MH directories as input, and you have
not deleted any files, you should get the same numbers assigned for
each message.
--ewh
