[sf-lug] New to this list; Gmane.org, anyone?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):

> 'lo. I just finally subscribed to this list, albeit with the "nomail" 
> option.

Cc'ing you with a direct copy of this reply.

 I'm hoping to get the list archive mirrored on gmane.org, with 
> the added benefits that brings, including a web form for posting to the 
> list, an NNTP gateway for participating in it, and four different RSS 
> feeds of the list. Currently, replying to old messages not in one's 
> inbox requires manually setting the In-Reply-To headers. Note that the 
> current system hosting the list, linuxmafia.com, is capable of 
> providing the NNTP gateway itself, but in a slightly more limited role. 

Quite.  Just as CABAL's mailing list "conspire" is served up for NNTP
access as newsgroup cabal.conspire, this mailing list could be offered
as newsgroup sf-lug.general or something like that.  The "limited role" 
probably refers to my need to enable access by individual request to 
users' static IP addresses only.  This limitation is because of the
leafnode NNTP daemon's lack of any means of blocking spam other than 
limiting access by IP address in /etc/hosts.allow.

> I asked Jim, and he thinks that mirroring on gmane.org is a great idea, 
> but that his opinion is his alone, and not necessarily that of others 
> on the list. So, how about having some of you fellow list participants 
> discuss the matter? 

I think it's an excellent idea.

> If people like the idea, there's another question to answer: E-mail
> addresses in the mirrored archive get obscured in one of two ways:
> Either the "@" is replaced with "at" inside the message, or the whole
> address is scrambled. Unfortunately, there is no option to leave them
> as they are.

<shrug>  I'm not surprised:  The "I'm hiding my address from spammers" 
minority is always vocal.  

> The past two years of the list are trivial to copy over into the
> mirror because the mbox file is easily web-accessible. However, I
> really hope the first year and a half of archives can join them there.
> I understand that the machine that hosted those died, but I don't know
> to what degree the old Mailman mbox file is irretrievable from it, nor
> whether any backups of it existed. Alas, the mbox format file really
> is the only way that part of the list's history can rejoin it in this
> medium, and Jim's meticulous retention of each message individually is
> insufficient.

If Jim can provide me with that set of files, I can probably construct
a corresponding mbox programmatically.  Furthermore, I could then
prepend that mbox to Mailman's records here and regenerate the
back-postings archive, so that the list's history is complete again.

Anyway, Daniel, you are of course welcome to get the raw mbox
that's been accumulated on this site:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug.mbox/sf-lug.mbox , or local file
/var/lib/mailman/archives/public/sf-lug.mbox/sf-lug.mbox .

> I probably won't reply back to this thread unless everybody comes to
> an agreement, but I'll be checking for replies nonetheless.

I hope you won't delay indefinitely for lack of a sufficient number of
responses.  I don't think you'll be getting many, but only because most
subscribers aren't really sure they have the basis for an opinion.