Re: Mailing list archive is available

[Steven L Baur <steve@xemacs.org>]

[There's an important question at the bottom of this message]

Jason R Mastaler <jason@mastaler.com> writes:

> Steven L Baur <steve@xemacs.org> writes:
>> It's searchable now ...

It's indexed using Swish, a front-end to WWWWAIS, anything else
WWWWAIS should be O.K. if I'm reading the sparse documentation correctly.

> Great!  It doesn't look like the messages for May, June or July of
> this year are indexed yet, but otherwise seems to be working for the
> most part.

That's what I like about the Emacs community -- you can't get away
with *anything* ... :-/

You are correct.  To be more precise, it is indexed through a Brian
Edmonds message on 17 May:

Subject: Re: feature request: find cancel
Date: 17 May 1997 16:01:45 -0700
From: edmonds@cs.ubc.ca (Brian Edmonds)
Message-ID: <37afltem92.fsf@mornir.gweep.bc.ca>

I didn't find this problem until after indexing the archives twice (a
*most* painful process -- ~100 minutes at 95% CPU on a Pentium 100).

It'll be fixed the next time I let the indexing program run, probably
sometime this weekend in the wee hours.

> Is there something preventing indexing of numbers or
> hostnames?

Probably.  I don't think numbers are indexed. There's also a threshold
number of hits before certain `popular' words are dropped.  Does searching
for any part of Lars' name or `Gnus' work?  [I just checked, they don't]
According to the documentation they shouldn't be indexed due to the high
frequency of occurrences.

> Searching for any of the Gnus versions (v5.4.17 for
> example) or say "www.gnus.org" doesn't return any matches despite
> being in the archives in several places. 

Now for the important question, these archives have to move off of
miranova.com sometime soonish since I haven't worked for them
since April.  The stablest home I can provide for them would be at
xemacs.org.  A more logical place might be gnus.org.  What do people
think?