Re: disk space

[Bob Proulx]

Hi Glenn,

Glenn Morris wrote:
> If there is more space on the VM host, that is obviously easier.
> But IIRC last time this came up I was told there wasn't any left
> (the size has already been increased a couple of times over the years).

Everything depends upon which underlying server is hosting things.
And I have been getting told that they have upgraded storage available
on all of the servers now.

> Do note that the mailman archives serve no real purpose. They aren't
> public (and should not be). The only point of mailman in the system is
> to do the initial moderation of submissions.

Oh!  I didn't realize that they weren't ever public.

> After that, accepted messages get passed to debbugs, which stores
> all the mails itself (in /var/lib/debbugs). The fact that mailman
> _also_ archives all the mails is a side-effect.

It's an optional feature that can be selected on or off.  There are a
lot of the mailing lists that have it off and do not archive the
mail.  But by default most do have archiving enabled.

> If implementing the system from scratch, we might have disabled
> mailman archiving from the start. As it stands, 9GB (25% of the
> disk) is basically being wasted.

In that case I agree that it probably makes sense to expire the oldest
of the messages in order to free up that disk space.  And perhaps we
should cron that task so that it is continuously expired at some
reasonable rate.

> The only conceivable use for the mailman archives is if the debbugs part
> breaks, then one could recover messages from mailman and re-inject them
> into debbugs. But that would be a short-term thing, ie only going back a
> day or so. There will never be a need to get years-old mails from the
> mailman archives.

Agreed.  It's probably nice to have a short nearline backup of
incoming messages available just-in-case.  But not since the beginning
of time.

> But please feel free to deal with it however you prefer. Thanks! :)

This week I got swamped early and have not had time to engage with the
admins in the "now-time" so I haven't found out the specific details
of debbugs yet.  I will still plan on doing that regardless to
understand the current situation.

Bob