[Author not subsribed, please CC] Consider this a "letter to the editor" from a long time subscriber[1]. As is customary in such letters, it is a rant.
I read a lot of debian lists trough the archives[2], so I feel sort of qualified to represent the users here. I am not sure what exactly the problems with mail archives are but please don't write of MhonArc too soon. Try using one of those new sites some times. They look good but for intensive reading they are actually impractical. For instance geocrawler.com is awful if you want to come back two days later and read just the new messages in some threads. The same holds for a lot of other dedicated mail archive sites. Another bad example is the Bugtrac archive at securityfocus.org. I miss the Geek Girl! Most of the sites I have seen that are actually practical to read use plain and simple MhonArc! In fact it is possible to do very nice sites. Consider for instance: http://tug.org/ListsArchives/pdftex/threads.html - Most recent thread _first_ - Notice how space is saved by not repeating the subject of the thread all the time. For a superb date sorted page see http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2000-01 - Again, information is not needlesly repeated. Somebody could do the world a great favor by combining these two and sending the results to MhonArc author for inclusion as the default. And now I'll stop bothering you. Jan Footnotes: [1] Although in this context "non-subscriber" would be more appropriate. [2] Don't ask we why. The original idea was that I would read list I don't subscribe too less intensively I guess. That doesn't really work, but anyway. -- Jan Vroonhof http://www.math.ethz.ch/~vroonhof/ Mathematik, vroonhof @ math.ethz.ch HG E16, ETH-Zentrum, Tel: +41-1-6325456/25154 Raemistrasse 101, CH-8092 Zuerich. Fax: +41-1-6321085
