[Python-ideas] New Project to Capture summaries from this

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 4:52 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 03:25:34PM -0000, Richard Whitehead wrote:
> > Chris,
> >
> > As a new member to this list, I can tell you that searching for relevant old
> > content was effectively impossible, so I'm all for some way of doing that.
>
> "Effectively impossible" is a gross exaggeration.
>
> The old mailman built-in search functionality is not fantastic, but it's
> not useless either, and more importantly, Google does a great job of
> indexing the archives.

It really doesn't. I often need to look up specific emails in the
mail.python.org archives, that I remember seeing or writing, in order
to link to them. IME, Google never works for this. For whatever
reason, most pages on mail.python.org are not included in Google's
index.

For example, here's a post of yours from a few weeks ago:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-March/055911.html

AFAICT, it is not possible to find that post with Google. For example,
doing a site-restricted search with an exact quote from your email
says that there are no pages that match:
https://www.google.com/search?q="Is+that+common+enough+that+it+needs+to+be+built-in+to+dict+itself%3F"+site%3Amail.python.org

(I also just tried a few variants of that search on Bing and
DuckDuckGo, and they both failed as well.)

The only reliable way that I know of to find emails on mail.python.org
is to (a) find the email in my MUA's archives, (b) note author and the
date it was sent, (c) navigate through the mailman archives 'date'
index to narrow things down, and then click around manually until I
find the post I'm looking for.

I don't think this proves we should switch to using Github issues or
something instead. But I do think we should listen when people say
that they're struggling with something, instead of dismissing their
concerns.

-n

--
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org