I'm noodling around with the idea of creating an archive and index of
all of the messages to the mailing list over the years for purposes of
quickly finding all of the messages that have definitive information on
a given topic. Simply searching on Google or through my mail spool just
doesn't cut it, since there's too much discussion and too little
decision (I'm not calling it signal-to-noise, since that's somewhat
pejorative, and I'm not trying to say the discussion is useless, just
not usually what I'm looking for).
To that end, I've got a mockup of what I'm thinking of with a handful of
Larry's messages in it (in Mediawiki):
http://www.ajs.com/perl6index/index.php/Perl.perl6.language
If people like it, then I'll write a tool that automatically populates
the database, and the site will probably get its own hostname for future
flexibility. Ultimately the categorization (which is the important part)
will have to be a manual task, but it's not quite as daunting as one
might think, given a MediaWiki that contains all of the messages.
Any thoughts?
Here are some other starting points if you like:
Everything by Larry (currently everything):
http://www.ajs.com/perl6index/index.php/Category:Larry_Wall
Brainstorming:
http://www.ajs.com/perl6index/index.php/Category:Brainstorming
Last month:
http://www.ajs.com/perl6index/index.php/Category:September_2006
One other way to go would be to take all of the summaries and start with
those. Then, each message could be a link from a summary.... Then again,
that could always be put in later, and finding the mapping between
summaries and threads might be a pain, programmatically.
