On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 01:50:22PM -0700, Lee Passey wrote:
On 11/28/2012 1:15 PM, Al Haines wrote:
On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 10:38:23AM -0700, Lee Passey wrote:
This is great information. Can the list be made searchable, so if I have only the e-text number I can find the associated posting (or reposting) message?
Posting notes are archived by month/year. They're ordered by the date in which they were sent by the WWers, which is more or less in numerical order. There are two exceptions: when etext numbers are reserved for future use and when an old, pre10K, etext is reposted.
When a pre10K etext is reposted, its repost note appears in the month in which the reposting WWer sent the repost note.
Reservations occur when numbers are prerequested, usually by DP, for a multi-volume set with cross-links. Such reserved numbers may not actually get used/posted for some time, i.e. they might be requested in June, but not actually be submitted/posted until several months later, depending on how long it takes to post-process the various volumes of the set. Posting notes for reserved numbers will appear in the month of posting, not the month of request.
A beautiful example of a non sequitur. The question was not "how is the list archive structured?" the question was "can it be made searchable so messages involving a specific e-text number can be found?" Of course I can download the zip file for every month of each of the past 3 years (apparently the limit of the archive), extract each file from the gzip/tar, and then grep for the number, but a web-based interface would be more user friendly.
We're using the packaged version of Mailman mailing list software, as delivered by Ubuntu Linux. This doesn't include a search capability. You don't need to download the monthly gzip'd text, though. Since they're mostly in order, as Al mentioned, you can just take a few guesses to narrow in (sort of a binary search). I remember there were some plugins to Mailman that would make lists searchable, but don't recall their names to look for them. If anyone else remembers, I could take a stab at adding a search functionality. It might be that some of the mailing lists meta-archivers have a searchable interface, but I couldn't find one just now. All that said: if you are just looking for "who posted this, and when," feel free to ask me, or email pgww@lists.pglaf.org, and I can dig it up from my archives. -- Greg