Thanks Ben. You mean Æthelred the Unready was posting a Hugs Bug??
It would appear that way; truly a man ahead of his time…
that spurious 1970 message (titled OSX) is now repeated in every month and every year from March 1970 up through the 70s, 80s, 90s to early 2000s. From October 2000 on, it appears mixed in with genuine historic posts.
Very curious. This indeed seems like a bug triggered by a malformed message, bearing a send date of 1970-03-12Z04:02:27. It’s not entirely clear what to do here; I could modify the date to place it in its likely originating year.
(Also historic posts Aug-Sep 2000 seem absent.)
I’m confused by this; there appear to be no posts in the Pipermail archive from this period either. Are you certain there was traffic in these months? This all predates me but it seems like this may have been the very beginning of the list.
Thanks for your careful checking. It’s best that we catch these issues sooner rather than later, when my recollection of the migration has faded.
I see one in Aug 2000 ‘(no subject)’. I agree none in Sep, but mailman has hallucinated the ‘OSX’ 1970 post again.
Thanks for your careful checking.
Happy to help/sorry I can’t do more. And it’s not just the Hugs-Bugs is messed up. I suspect it’s most of the long-standing/little-used lists. That is, those that don’t get a post every month.
Even the main ‘Haskell’ list seems to have hallucinations back to 1970 and each month after. Then there’s a genuine thread starting Feb 1988 that seems to be repeated in each month up to Dec 1999. In late 1999 there’s other genuine threads that seem to be repeated. (This is all hard work to check, with mailman’s dysergonomic browsing format.)
I do think it’s valuable to be able to go back over design decisions. There’s an interchange from 1999 that I want to re-litigate one day, in which Wadler over-ruled SPJ, but with a great deal of hindsight, Wadler was wrong.
A couple of annoyances I’ve noticed trying to use the lists …
Failing to thread. On haskell-cafe there’s an October message titled ‘fplangc’. I tried to reply to that, titled ‘Re: fplangc’. But rather than threading those two together, they’re showing as separate entries.
Expired list owners. (I mean the account has expired.) I posted a October message to Hugs-Bugs. It’s showing fine. Mailman also copies the message to the owner. (Neil Mitchell in this case, who’s no longer using the registered @ddress.) I got one ‘Delivery Failed’ email reply — which also is fine. But every couple of days after that i’ve gotten a repeat ‘Delivery Status’ email, which is getting annoying.