Subject: new ietf mail archive? permanent urls?

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2016 11:42:45 +0000 (UTC)

okay, I've finally belatedly noticed the new ietf mail archive.
(because I have a life these days.)

Is e.g.
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/GKYUQNOssvg-JIsPfj90_YI5r9w
a permanent url? If not, should it be?

(It's occasionally
useful to refer to emails directly, and cite text with urls, but
that doesn't look like a good choice. I mean, no date in url?
as a hint?)

thanks
 
Lloyd Wood
http://about.me/lloydwood

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2016 10:53:52 -0400

For whatever it is worth, I share Lloyd's concern.  The new
setup is fine is one is trying to skim recent discussions on a
mailing list and reasonably so to find a particular subject
thread but I question its utility for references to particular
messages, even references in later messages that one might want
to trace back.  For those purposes, it would be much better to
have a URL that explicitly reflects the list name (WG lists seem
to do that, but the IETF list doesn't) and a date or date
range... or we should supply a DOI (and resolution mechanism) or
appropriately-persistent URN.

By the way, from a small semi-random sample, a large fraction of
the links to WG mailing lists identified at
https://datatracker.ietf.org/list/wg/ are dead.  Is any effort
being made to capture those discussions for historical purposes?
Would it be worth explicitly identifying the useless links?

As a non-random sample to illustrate the magnitude of the
problem, I went through the links for WG names starting in "a"
and exactly one of those that did not point to an IETF.ORG site
is valid and one is clearly bogus (the domain-part of the URL is
"www/").     So another question is "is anyone meaningfully
responsible for that list?"

best,
   john

--On Sunday, March 20, 2016 11:42 +0000 [email-masked]
wrote:

> https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/GKYUQNOssvg-JIsPfj9
> 0_YI5r9w a permanent url? If not, should it be?
> 
> (It's occasionally
> useful to refer to emails directly, and cite text with urls,
> but that doesn't look like a good choice. I mean, no date in
> url? as a hint?)

---

From: Rich Kulawiec <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2016 17:42:44 -0400

On Sun, Mar 20, 2016 at 10:53:52AM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
> range... 

The archiving built into Mailman does all this -- I can't think
of any reason why *all* IETF list archives shouldn't be using it.

(Note that the same archiving mechanism is capable of ingesting
archives that were created with other mailing list managers and
integrating them into a seamless whole.)

> Would it be worth explicitly identifying the useless links?

There should be complete archives of all lists maintained "forever",
whatever that works out to be.  It's quite easy to set this up even
for discontinued lists, again using Mailman's built-in archiving mechanism.

If the goal here is "make sure that all archives of all IETF mailing
lists that have ever existed and that exist now are all stored in
an accessible, unified, useful format", then (a) I'm on board with
that and (b) I'm willing to do the legwork.

---rsk

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 11:03:22 +0100

Hi Lloyd,

> a permanent url? If not, should it be?

Yes, it is.  If you go and look at the message headers, you'll notice
that there's even an Archived-At: header field which has that permanent
url as its value.

> that doesn't look like a good choice. I mean, no date in url?

Good point. I think it would be rather easy to add a date hint to the
permanent URL, even if I think we'd still be using just the list and
hash to identify and pull out the message at the server end.  The list
is already in the URL (in the case of the URL above, the list identifier
is the '/ietf/' part).

Regards,

	Henrik

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 11:48:06 +0000 (UTC)

Hi Henrik,

I'd be good with list/YYYY/MM/DD/identifier-hash (per Wordpress
and in line with ISO8601 - none of that US MM/DD/YY funny stuff)
added into the urls, allowing mails to be retrieved either with
or without the date. (I presume the list id is optional as well
but
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/GKYUQNOssvg-JIsPfj90_YI5r9wdoesn't work as I might expect.

if 
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/list/YYYY/MM/DD/

can return all emails to that list on that date, so much the better:
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/list/YYYY/MM
gives the entire month, etc.

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/GKYUQNOssvg-JIsPfj90_YI5r9w
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/GKYUQNOssvg-JIsPfj90_YI5r9w
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/2016/03/20/GKYUQNOssvg-JIsPfj90_YI5r9w

should return the same thing.

thanks
Lloyd Wood [email-masked] http://about.me/lloydwood 

----- Original Message -----
From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]; IETF Discussion <[email-masked]>
Sent: Monday, 21 March 2016, 21:03
Subject: Re: new ietf mail archive? permanent urls?

Hi Lloyd,

Regards,

    Henrik

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 13:47:22 +0100

On 2016-03-21 12:48, [email-masked] wrote:
> doesn't work as I might expect.

No, the list is necessary.  That decision was based on the same message
sometimes going to multiple lists, and being archived as different
items for the different lists.  Yes, it would probably be possible to
pull out the right message without the list, but that becomes a GUI
headache when you find multiple matching items on different lists.

> can return all emails to that list on that date, so much the better:

That sounds nifty, yes.

> gives the entire month, etc.

Ack.

> should return the same thing.

Well, not the first one, as indicated above.  That would mean guessing
which one to present, for messages going to multiple lists, and explicit
is better than implicit.  But I like the date-in-url enhancements.

Regards,

	Henrik