Re: Major splitting problem ... Advice please

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> writes:

>> However, there are enough differnet date styles to make that kind of
>> split pretty hard to program.  Also the problem of some messages
>> that came late to a thread, landing in a different group arises.
>> Keeping all thead members in one group may not even be possible,
>> except by hand.  I'm not sure.
>
> Hmm.  I had just been planning to use gnus date functions.  I hadn't
> considered that those might not be sufficient.

My comments may have been a little misleading.  They were directed at
the idea of splitting messages by date with tools such as awk and
perl.  What I was getting at was a certain amount of difficulty
getting regular expressions that match all possible date formulations
like these (Taken from a sample of headers on comp.unix.solaris):

 Date: 24 Sep 2001 09:07:45 GMT
 Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 15:30:18 +0100
 Date: 8 Oct 2001 14:30:26 GMT
 Date: 08 Oct 2001 16:42:08 +0200
 Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2001 20:02:06 +0200
 Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2001 17:45:17 GMT


There are some even odder formulations to be found.  Probably not
impossible to set regexp that will work for them all, but just a pita.

If you plan to use the date functions that do limiting like these:
 `/ t' and 'C-u / t'  It may not be a problem.  I wanted to do the
 splitting outside gnus because it is such a large archive.

(app 250,000  messages, from about a dozen groups)

I haven't tried this but I suspect one could do this by first setting
up a nnmail split methods that splits by date to mnemonic named
groups.  Then entering the monster groups and split them with `M P a
<RET> B r <RET>. Adjusting the spit method rules for each group, But
here again, I would expect some extensive experimentation getting the
date regexp right.  And it would be very time intensive to do that
inside gnus I think, assuming the groups are above 25,000 or so.