[Texmacs-dev] Searching the mailing list archives

[David Allouche]

On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 04:26:40PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> > All developers are likely *interested* in all aspects of TeXmacs. I
> > believe we can have a healthier developper community if everyone has
> > an idea of what is going on and what is there place in the big
> > picture.
> > 
> > I understand that would be a lot of time and that you have other
> > things to do, so I am wondering what medium would make it easiest.
> 
> I'm sorry for my irritation. I propose that one or more volunteers
> write a summary of the discussions on the mailing list in the tmdoc
> format, so that we can put it on the online documentation site.
> It might be a good idea to send a short overview of the different
> topics to the mailing list first.

Apologies. I indeed was insinuating. I'll buy you a pizza for my
misbehaviour next time we meet.

I hope someone will be interested in doing what you propose.

One problem is that I know no good tool to search the mailing list
archives. Currently, when I want to retrieve some mail I use a Python
script to produce a mbox containing relevant threads from my personal
archives. That is far from ideal since direct hit are not
differentiated from indirect hits (other messages of the thread).

Also, it must be considered that interesting threads may span several
archive mbox (users, dev, private mail).

One good thing to do for the future might be to add some special
markup when one posts a message which he consider can be of lasting
interest. For example there could be something like a keyword line
looking like.

[keywords: search mailing list archive]
for this specific mail

[keywords: axiom CAS interface literate programming lp pamphlet]
for plans about Axiom

Another problem is that some mails may appear interesting in
retrospect, and conversely, threads should not always be retrieved
completely. So there might be a use for additional annotation, and
even for external annotation. But I have no idea how that should be
done.

Any idea?

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.