I miss the archive URLs that we had on the bottom of dev_at_s.tigris.o
emails. They were very useful when logging something in the issue
tracker or digging up the history of a thread.
I went looking in the archives anyway, including some linked from <>,
and found spiders and broken windows...
TIGRIS ARCHIVE
The s.tigris.o archive viewer had a very good UI in the last year,
despite the service initially having some awful bugs. Completeness: it
has not been receiving the s.apache.o emails. We could ask to start
archiving them and to fill in the gap in history, but I don't know if
Tigris can be used to archive mail that is hosted externally at Apache
mailing list; quite possibly not.
APACHE ARCHIVE
I went looking for the new dev_at_s.apache.org archive, and found it at
<http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/subversion-dev/>. Although it
is present and working, I am very disappointed with its usability. For
example, the message threads are always split by month, with no easy way
to follow the thread across a month boundary, and the threaded "browser"
view does not have a message-specific or thread-specific URL so the only
obvious way you can link to a specific message is to link to the
single-message view and that view doesn't let you go back to the
"browser" view of that message. As a technical plus point, it does let
you link to a message by constructing a URL containing the Message-Id
header.
HAXX ARCHIVE
Before the new tigris archive UI, <http://svn.haxx.se/dev/> served us
very well. The haxx UI is fairly usable but in some ways crude -
especially the simple Google search of the site being its only search
mechanism. Completeness: It archives both s.tigris.o and s.apache.o. I
think it has some gaps during the change-over, which we can fill in.
MAIL-ARCHIVE.COM
At first sight I thought this archive:
<http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@subversion.apache.org/> has a UI that
is quite intuitive and clean, with good threading, though rather
minimalist in features. Unfortunately for us it does not seem to support
attachments well or consistently, just displaying them in line if they
are text, so I think that rules it out. Completeness: It has the
s.apache.o emails and can import our old archives.
MARC ARCHIVE
MARC <http://marc.info/?l=subversion-dev> looks OK. Completeness: It has
Subversion archives up to a year ago, and could probably be updated.
Worthy of further investigation.
MARKMAIL ARCHIVE
MarkMail <http://httpd.markmail.org/search/#query:list%
3Aorg.apache.httpd.dev> (that being the page for dev_at_httpd) looks like a
good UI, comparable to Tigris. Initial impression is of adverts, but I
think they will not necessarily be obtrusive and it is worthy of further
investigation.
SO...
* Anyone got wise words on choosing an archive with a UI for our
practical interactive use?
* I would like us to configure the list server to put an archive URL
for the message at the bottom of each email. (Until we find a better
archive, it should point to the apache.org archive.) Anyone know how to
go about this?
- Julian
Received on 2009-12-09 14:11:36 CET