>>>>
Other considerations
Before you upgrade, you should consider a few things like:
URLs to archived messages will break, unless you take extra steps to
keep them around. Upgrade mechanism makes sure to import all your
archived messages in the new system, but, all the URLs to the new
messages are going to be different.
>>>>
Simply put, this may be a dealbreaker. At W3C, it definitely would.
Some emails and other IETF documents may contain pointers (URIs) to
archived emails, and all these pointers would stop to work.
Also, since quite a while, emails going through the IETF mailing list
software contain Archived-At headers. It is quite possible that these
are also affected (i.e. would also become unusable). If that's the
case, then this upgrade should be stopped.
The continuous availability and usability of older references is at
least as important as what happens with the user interface (Tom's main
point). For the user interface, most users get used to most changes
quite quickly. But messing up old URIs may not be easy to fix.
I agree that old URIs pointing to archived messages need to keep working.
But if mailman cannot be configured to use the old-style URIs, is it
sufficient for the web server to issue redirects from the old URIs to
point to the new URIs? And can the web server be configured to do this?
Keith
