Text archive creator script available

[Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden@fastmail.fm>]

A couple of people (Jose Lorenzo and Dave Pawson) have spoken of a 
desire for a way to convert the current web-accessible list archives 
into a single text file (presumably an mbox format email archive).

I've created and tested just such a script, called 
oiic-archive-converter.pl and made it available (under the GNU GPL v2, 
in case that matters) at

   http://www.jmarsden.org/oiic/oiic-archive-converter.pl

It needs the CPAN HTML::Parser module, other than that it should run 
anywhere Perl runs, including at least Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft 
Windows, and OS X.  So hopefully it is sufficiently portable for a group 
discussing interoperability!

The idea is that you grab the HTML files using wget (or any other way 
you choose) and then convert them to a single file.  For example (as the 
comments in the script say!):

To obtain and archive the oiic-formation-discuss list
for June 2008 in a file called oiic-formation-discuss-200806, do:

   wget -nd -r -l 1 -A "msg*" \ 
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/oiic-formation-discuss/200806/maillist.html

    for i in msg*.html ; do perl oiic-archive-converter.pl $i \ 
 >>oiic-formation-discuss-200806 ; done

The resulting mbox file is usable by at least one email client I tested 
it with (mutt), if others have issues with it please email me or find me 
on #oiic .

Jonathan