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The mailing list archives are currently indexed on a single page. This means that http://www.netbeans.org/www-nbdev/ for example currently spans June 5th -> Nov 2nd, and the index page comes to around 360K. nbdev is probably the worst atm, but the others are of course growing also. It would probably be good if this index was split up by week or month, and some kind of navigation mechanism implemented to move around between each month's index.
I agree. This will be an enhancement, but I think a good one to put on the roadmap for the product. I can't say it will be resolved soon, but I will put in a feature request for sourcecast due out 1/5/01. http://projects.collab.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=785
Extra comments from Evan - Assuming the archive was broken into some kind of chronological chunks, the older the chunk, the longer period it could cover. ie nbdev archives today should probably be split by day, definitely by week. However 6mths+ ago a single page for the whole month is probably better.
duplicate of 8531. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 8531 ***
Reopened, closing 8531. I had closed this one and left the other one open because 8531 was more general. This is not just an issue with nbdev, but as was pointed out -- this bug contains more information.
*** Bug 8531 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is the issue I'm really pushing on right now. I'm marking it P2 so visually it gets bumped up in the hierarchy.
Bill Shannon has pointed out - The IMAP mailing list also uses Mhonarc, v2.4.6 according to the page footer : http://www.washington.edu/imap/listarch/current/ Their archives are broken down by year, and then appoximately by month, though not exactly, there are 18pages for 1999, and 20 so far for 2000. Anyway, it is broken down into quite small chunks. As I understand it we are also using Mhonarc. If breaking up the index page of the mailing list archives is simply a configuration option, then lets pursue and do this now! I had been thinking this was a limitation of Mhonarc, and changing it would involve hacking source and considerable work. Tweaking config however should be much easier. A side note - it would be cool if this Mhonarc config was also in our control, maybe a .cfg type file under the look/ project.
PS - the IMAP site also seems to use a custom mail search utility, ie specificly for searching mail archives, and not www. I say this as the results returned after a search are pretty customised, showing subject and sender as well as a one line extract of the msg. Unless there exists a search tool that is clever enough to search and index mail archives and www pages differently, I guess that would require 2 search tools on the site. This doesn't sound great, but the current format of search results - "msg02010.html" and a URL, no further info - leaves a lot to be desired.
This is getting to be more and more of a problem BTW. Loading this page takes a minute at least, plus another minute of Netscape freezing while it computes the table layout...
I'm going to divide up the archives. It's not just a configuration option, but it can be scripted. Do you have any preference as to how you'd like the URLs to look? Here are some possibilities: http://www.openoffice.org/www-dev/YYYY/MMM/ http://www.openoffice.org/www-dev/YYYY-MM/ http://www.openoffice.org/www-dev/{count}/ count would simply increase by one for every N messages (or approx N messages). I think there would be no link from one of these groupings to another, unfortunately ... but at least the archives would be more usable. (I have tried to view them, over a fast connection; it's possible for me, but painful.) http://www.openoffice.org/www-dev/current/ will always work for the current grouping (whatever that may be). I'm expecting that http://www.openoffice.org/www-dev/ would be an index which would have an URL for each subgrouping. Doing this transformation will break the archive for a limited period of time -- I'm not sure how long, though I can determine the precise amount. It will also involve delaying message delivery until it's complete (so as to avoid having new messages including in the wrong grouping). Besides nbdev -- are there any other lists for which lists you'd like this done? So far as the issues w/ searching -- that's something we're generally addressing in sourcecast, though there are outstanding issues in that right now. In the short term, I don't think it's going to be possible to have a better search interface until we upgrade netbeans.org to sourcecast. Without significant additional work, it won't be possible to use different groupings for older messages, compared with new ones. (Jack suggested weeks for recent messages, and months for messages > 6months old in one of his comments.) I'm not planning on doing such a thing right now.
I am surprised this is so difficult. Doesn't Mhonarc have all this built in ? There is even a free mail archival site using Mhonarc which handles this better than we do - http://www.mail-archive.com/ Our archives are embarassing and useless atm. > I think there would be no link from one of these groupings to another, The archives need to be navigable. There should be links between any seperate pages. > Besides nbdev -- are there any other lists for which lists you'd like this done? This should be set up for all mailing lists that have web archives. No list archive is going to shrink - if it doesn't need it now it will next week/month/xxx > until we upgrade netbeans.org to sourcecast. When can we expect this ? RE Search - http://www.mhonarc.org/ includes a link to a "search engine for Mhonarc archives" called marc-search. Sounds ideal - we could run it as a seperate CGI, and put up a form with a seperate text box (seperate from the normal search box) for mail archive searches.
This indeed has been hanging on too long. Working on getting resolution.
My experience playing with MHonArc's conf is that it does indeed suck, and this is not nearly as easy as it should be. I'm looking into why the index by date which I'm generating is missing links (see the first link, below)... you can see the indexes, by dates or by threads: http://www.netbeans.org/test-www-nbdev/index.html http://www.netbeans.org/test-www-nbdev/mail2.html ... http://www.netbeans.org/test-www-nbdev/threads.html Personally, I'd rather use a simpler solution. I'm willing to spend a little more time on this, but not much -- I've got other work for netbeans, and spending time on this takes away from the time I've got to spend on that stuff. So far as adding another search engine -- one of the basic problems which we have w/ searching is the size of some of the MHonArc archives. I'm not interested in spending time verifying that yet another piece of software is at least somewhat secure and that it performs at least adequately. Besides -- we're not going to be using that on other sourcecast installations, so installing this would make netbeans more custom and less maintainable.
Ok, I've worked out some more of MHonArc's strangeness. Please take a look at this and tell me what you think: http://www.netbeans.org/test-www-nbdev/ (There's a link to the threaded index embedded.) I'm not entirely happy with this implementation -- MHonArc is quite inefficient, and there are problems with it. But it should give you an idea of how this would work out. Minor changes in formatting may well be possible -- certainly they are if you want to edit the MHonArc conf file and send it back. MHonArc's conf language provides a fair bit of flexibility. OTOH, I see no evidence that it's possible to do groups of different size based on how old the grouping is. The grouping which you see in this is for 150 messages per page; that number is configurable. Changing this for all the lists can be done, but involves add'l load and delayed mail during the time when the change is being done.
Test page looks good, thanks! Only suggestion is to include the navigation links at the bottom of the page as well as the top, if possible. RE searching - "we're not going to be using that on other sourcecast installations" - what does this mean ? Is there similar functionality already in sourcecast ? If not, pls let us know, as I would file this as an enhancement request.
*** Bug 9457 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I believe this is resolved now: I've changed our configuration so that MHonArc index pages have at most 150 elements in them. Lists will be put into that format as new mail arrives. I added navigation links at the bottom and made a few minor changes in the HTML ... If you notice any problems, please reopen this issue. I am concerned about MHonArc's performance -- it's O(n*n) w/ the number of messages in each archive, which is only going to get worse. It might be worth considering splitting nbdev and nbusers into separate archives for 2000 and 2001 ... this seems to be the standard practice w/ MHonArc, and I have noticed slowdowns which seem related to MHonArc. I haven't made any changes related to this, though, since it'd also require changing links to the archives. So far as search goes -- in sourcecast, we will have search for mailing lists, which presents more meaningful results pages. But currently it searches mailing lists separately from other documents -- and it only searches one list at a time. I intend to make sure it's possible to search more than one list at a time ... but it'd be worthwhile to file an enhancement request outlining the features which you consider useful, important, or necessary.
Note: the thread index seems to have different navigation from the date index, specifically no indication of which # page you are on, nor the <<<< and >>>> links.
Looks good, many thanks. Searching mailing lists seperately from other docs sounds perfect to me, this is what I have requested in the past. Only searching one list at a time is not so great - ideally the search page would have a series of checkboxes for which lists and/or other doc sets (like the website, or the FAQs) to search. Please see http://www.netbeans.org/bugs-cgi/show_bug.cgi?id=9163 for my current list of search requests/bugs - this covers both site searches and mail archive searches.
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