Re: Any way to get a file of the archives?

[Andrew Shugg <andrew@neep.com.au>]

Ross Boylan said:
> I access the archives via dial-up, so browsing around is slow.  Is
> there a way to download the archives for a particular list so I can
> use my mail reader to look at them?
> 
> Specifically, I was thinking of the last 3-6 months for debian-kde.
> 
> Thanks.

Ordinarily the mhonarc software (that Debian uses to generate the online
list archives) can also make an mbox file available for separate
download; however a choice seems to have been made not to do this for
the mailing list archives (perhaps due to space constraints?).  It's a
nice feature available in the BTS.

You can get a very small amount of archive material this way:

  To: debian-kde-request@lists.debian.org
  Subject: archive help

  To: debian-kde-request@lists.debian.og
  Subject: archive
  [body]: ls latest

Another option would be to pull down the archives for off-line reading
from the web:

  wget -r -nc -nH -np -nv http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2002/

Check the man page if you're unfamiliar with wget, but that means
'recursive, don't refetch something I've already got, don't create host
directory, don't descend into the parent directory of this one, and
don't keep me up all night telling me about it.'

If it doesn't get everything by the time you get disconnected, you can
just run the command again and it will keep going.  You'll probably need
to delete the last file downloaded though if it was cut off before it
got to the end.

Another couple of options would be to look for any non-Debian archives
of the list (eg marc.theaimsgroup.com) that might have downloads
available for offline reading, and to ask people on the mailing list if
anyone could send you a gzipped copy of their debian-kde mailbox.  I'm
sure I'm not the only pack-rat who keeps everything they get.  =)

It would be nice if the list archives were available as (say) gzipped
mailboxes, or public IMAP folders.  This may not be a high priority at
the moment though.  =)

Andrew.

-- 
Andrew Shugg <andrew@neep.com.au>                   http://www.neep.com.au/

"Just remember, Mr Fawlty, there's always someone worse off than yourself."
"Is there?  Well I'd like to meet him.  I could do with a good laugh."