Subject: [Tools-discuss] IETF mailing list web archives

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:59:39 -0500

I've been frustrated for a long time about the web archives we
have. To me, they are pretty much unusable for anything other the
browsing the last few days of emails.

But, if you ever wanted to go look for something a month or a year
ago, it's just not possible

For the MHonArc stuff we are using, the only operations seem to be:

- Next page
- Prev Page
- Thread Index

And, each of these gives you one page of messages. No search ability,
etc.

I have found that if I want to go look for something, I effectively
have to download one the mbox format archives and incorporate it into
my MUA. Surely we can do better than that!

Is this an area that is a known problem with a fix in the pipeline?
Or, is a prod needed to look into moving to a better web interface?

Do others thing we need an improvement in this area?

Thomas
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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:07:34 +0100

Thomas Narten wrote:
> ...
> ...

Indeed.

I guess the only reason why I haven't been complaining so far is because 
the mailing lists of particular importance to me happen to be hosted by 
the W3C (WebDAV and HTTP).

BR, Julian

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From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:20:49 +0100

Hi,

I got frustrated about that, too, and started a Google custom search a  
while back that searches the archives (http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006728497408158459967%3Aybxjdw-bjjw 
).

I'm not totally happy with it and there are bugs, for example, it  
doesn't find anything in the IPsec archives even though the correct  
search pattern is in place. Google doesn't offer any way to debug any  
issues with their custom search, so there's no way to fix this AFAIK.

But anyhow, give it a whirl.

Lars

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From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:36:11 -0500

> issues with their custom search, so there's no way to fix this

Well, actually, isn't there stock mailing list software out there that
does what we need?

I don't think yet more specialized tools (and an indirection) are what
we want, I think the IETF needs better archives. So my aim here is to
get the IETF archive system improved to meet our needs.

I've thought at times of writing a short "requirements" document for
this, but is that necessary? How do we make progress on this topic?

Thomas

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From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:50:27 +0100

> Well, actually, isn't there stock mailing list software out there that

The only thing I know about are patches to mailman for htdig support.  
That would already be a step up, but still a far cry from Google  
Groups, Nabble, etc.

> get the IETF archive system improved to meet our needs.

I hear you.

> this, but is that necessary? How do we make progress on this topic?

Grab some of the available open source indexing solutions and try  
them? This might be something someone could look into at the SF code  
sprint.

Lars