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