For whatever it is worth, I share Lloyd's concern. The new
setup is fine is one is trying to skim recent discussions on a
mailing list and reasonably so to find a particular subject
thread but I question its utility for references to particular
messages, even references in later messages that one might want
to trace back. For those purposes, it would be much better to
have a URL that explicitly reflects the list name (WG lists seem
to do that, but the IETF list doesn't) and a date or date
range... or we should supply a DOI (and resolution mechanism) or
appropriately-persistent URN.
By the way, from a small semi-random sample, a large fraction of
the links to WG mailing lists identified at
https://datatracker.ietf.org/list/wg/ are dead. Is any effort
being made to capture those discussions for historical purposes?
Would it be worth explicitly identifying the useless links?
As a non-random sample to illustrate the magnitude of the
problem, I went through the links for WG names starting in "a"
and exactly one of those that did not point to an IETF.ORG site
is valid and one is clearly bogus (the domain-part of the URL is
"www/"). So another question is "is anyone meaningfully
responsible for that list?"
best,
john
--On Sunday, March 20, 2016 11:42 +0000
lloyd(_dot_)wood(_at_)yahoo(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk
wrote:
okay, I've finally belatedly noticed the new ietf mail archive.
(because I have a life these days.)
Is e.g.
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/GKYUQNOssvg-JIsPfj9
0_YI5r9w a permanent url? If not, should it be?
(It's occasionally
useful to refer to emails directly, and cite text with urls,
but that doesn't look like a good choice. I mean, no date in
url? as a hint?)