[Mpi-22] Previous messages

[Jeff Squyres]

On Apr 15, 2008, at 12:40 PM, Richard Treumann wrote:
> I appreciate you being willing to do this work at all so I am  
> reluctant to gripe.
>

No worries; it took me forever to get these up on the web (much longer  
than I anticipated).  It's best when this is a useful mechanism for  
all, so comments are appreciated.

> When I looked at MPI 2.2 I did not notice that the opaque  
> directories are each a month, not a day. My mistake. I guess there  
> is a trade off. If a list goes on for thousands of messages it is  
> good to be able to filter by month.
>
> It does seem that finding the start of a thread can be hidden by  
> this month by month structure. For example in Feb (http://lists.mpi-forum.org/mpi-22/2008/02/index.php 
> ) there is a one item thread with title "Re: [mpi-22] FW: [mpi-21]  
> Proposal: MPI_OFFSET built-in type ". Most of this thread was in the  
> prior month but that is not visible if you come across it in Feb. If  
> you find the thread in the prior month (Jan), the forward links are  
> there and the Feb comment will be found but if you first find it in  
> the 02 folder you do not see that there is prior discussion.
>

Yes, this is a definite trade-off.  The hope is that the advanced  
search capabilities will make up for this tradeoff.  E.g., you can  
search for "mpi_offset" in the subject, body, etc.

The advanced search is on the front page of every list.  The simple  
search box in the top right will do a simple search and then take you  
to the advanced search box.

> My real concern is about being able to find and follow a complete  
> thread across its lifetime even if that lifetime is long or has big  
> time gaps. It looks like following forward is there but finding the  
> beginning or knowing you are not at the beginning can be more  
> difficult. Is there a way to provide back links into prior months  
> when using the thread view? Once we are doing MPI 3 and have threads  
> that date back a year or more it could be more of a problem finding  
> the whole thing.
>

FWIW, the archiver (software known as "hypermail") does do the back  
links from individual messages.  For example, this message on the Open  
MPI devel list:

     http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/devel/2008/04/3598.php

Was on April 1.  The "In reply to" link to the previous message was on  
March 31:

     http://www.open-mpi.org/community/lists/devel/2008/03/3590.php

It's not quite as seamless as a uniform thread view that spans months,  
but it does let you go backwards in time.

Do you have a better suggestion for a UI?  I'm assuming that the  
hypermail designers felt that this was a good tradeoff between a  
potentially-infinite thread / month view and being able to go  
backwards in time.


-- 
Jeff Squyres
Cisco Systems