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Aaron Sherman

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Oct 4, 2006, 5:45:13 PM10/4/06

to p6l

I'm noodling around with the idea of creating an archive and index of
all of the messages to the mailing list over the years for purposes of
quickly finding all of the messages that have definitive information on
a given topic. Simply searching on Google or through my mail spool just
doesn't cut it, since there's too much discussion and too little
decision (I'm not calling it signal-to-noise, since that's somewhat
pejorative, and I'm not trying to say the discussion is useless, just
not usually what I'm looking for).

To that end, I've got a mockup of what I'm thinking of with a handful of
Larry's messages in it (in Mediawiki):

http://www.ajs.com/perl6index/index.php/Perl.perl6.language

If people like it, then I'll write a tool that automatically populates
the database, and the site will probably get its own hostname for future
flexibility. Ultimately the categorization (which is the important part)
will have to be a manual task, but it's not quite as daunting as one
might think, given a MediaWiki that contains all of the messages.

Any thoughts?

Here are some other starting points if you like:

Everything by Larry (currently everything):

http://www.ajs.com/perl6index/index.php/Category:Larry_Wall

Brainstorming:

http://www.ajs.com/perl6index/index.php/Category:Brainstorming

Last month:

http://www.ajs.com/perl6index/index.php/Category:September_2006

One other way to go would be to take all of the summaries and start with
those. Then, each message could be a link from a summary.... Then again,
that could always be put in later, and finding the mapping between
summaries and threads might be a pain, programmatically.

Darren Duncan

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Oct 5, 2006, 2:34:03 AM10/5/06

to p6l

At 5:45 PM -0400 10/4/06, Aaron Sherman wrote:
>I'm noodling around with the idea of creating an archive and index
>of all of the messages to the mailing list over the years for
>purposes of quickly finding all of the messages that have definitive
>information on a given topic. Simply searching on Google or through
>my mail spool just doesn't cut it, since there's too much discussion
>and too little decision (I'm not calling it signal-to-noise, since
>that's somewhat pejorative, and I'm not trying to say the discussion
>is useless, just not usually what I'm looking for).

An archive for many Perl mailing lists already exists at:

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/

You should be able to use this to seed yours.

-- Darren Duncan

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