Archives of comp.lang.tcl?

[Richard Owlett]

Do archives of comp.lang.tcl exist which are not "part
of"/"related to" Google?

I wish to refer to posts to the group. I have practical and
philosophical/ethical reasons to avoid references involving
google groups.

[Alexandre Ferrieux]

Search by content is your friend: taking a sufficient number of highly
specific keywords from a not-too-recent post, google yields at least:

http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Tcl/comp.lang.tcl
http://comp.lang.tcl.narkive.com/

There might be more; I didn't bother to go beyond the "similar
results" link ;)

-Alex

[Richard Owlett]

Thank you. I've done similar searches but hadn't thought about
interpreting results that way. The first reference you gave even
organizes posts optimally.

[Fritz Wuehler]

Normally, one would use a proper snews:// URL scheme. For example, to
reference your post (which I'm replying to herein), you would give:

snews://nntp.aioe.org:563/efGdnUvvdN-KyybM...@supernews.com

Sadly, many browsers are ill-equipped to directly handle these URLs.
Lynx works, however. For example:

$ lynx 'snews://nntp.aioe.org:563/efGdnUvvdN-KyybM...@supernews.com'

Unlike Alex's solution, this approach is generic and will work for any
newsgroup. The downside is lack of browser support, and the fact that
a news server like aioe.org may not go as far back as the
archives. So the links will get stale quicker.

If you view your news in emacs, I have created an emacs macro that
generates the complete URL and puts it on the clipboard for pasting
where ever you need it.

(defun my-gnus-get-article-url ()
"Copy an URL for the current article to the X clipboard"
(interactive)
(dolist (buf (buffer-list))
(with-current-buffer buf
(when (eq major-mode 'gnus-article-mode)
(goto-char (point-min))
(gnus-summary-show-all-headers)
(re-search-forward "^Message-ID: <\\(.*\\)>$")
(setq msgid (match-string 1))
(goto-char (point-min))
(re-search-forward "^Xref: \\([^ ]*\\)[ ]\\(.*\\)$")
(setq domain (match-string 1)
articleid (match-string 2))
(setq hosts '(("aioe.org" . "nntp") ("gmane.org" . "news")))
(setq articleurl (concat "snews://" (cdr (assoc domain hosts)) "." domain ":563/" msgid))
(message "the URL is %s" articleurl)
(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
(with-temp-buffer
(insert articleurl)
(clipboard-kill-ring-save (point-min) (point-max)))
(gnus-article-hide-headers)))))

[Alexandre Ferrieux]

On Sunday, August 25, 2013 4:11:58 PM UTC+2, Fritz Wuehler wrote:
>
> snews://nntp.aioe.org:563/...

>
> Unlike Alex's solution, this approach is generic and will work for any
> newsgroup. The downside is lack of browser support, and the fact that
> a news server like aioe.org may not go as far back as the
> archives. So the links will get stale quicker.

It was my understanding that NNTP servers only had very limited storage; that by design, Usenet is a flowing thing; and that the idea of archiving them came after the fact... Also, local admins can decide which group to take or not.

Am I mistaken ? Are there, today, NNTP servers with both wide (groups) and deep (time) coverage ? With or without a decent search ?

-Alex

[Donal K. Fellows]

On 25/08/2013 16:38, Alexandre Ferrieux wrote:
> It was my understanding that NNTP servers only had very limited
> storage; that by design, Usenet is a flowing thing; and that the idea
> of archiving them came after the fact... Also, local admins can
> decide which group to take or not.
>
> Am I mistaken ? Are there, today, NNTP servers with both wide
> (groups) and deep (time) coverage ? With or without a decent search?

How far back is "deep"? For a few months back, eternal-september seem to
be a reasonable provider for comp.lang.tcl; more than I'd expect for a
general NNTP provider. However, I've not explored how wide they go
(though I suspect they don't carry alt.binaries.* for fairly obvious
reasons) so I can't offer much advice there.

For real deep search, I use Google. Still. (It's not that different.)

Donal.
--
Donal Fellows — Tcl user, Tcl maintainer, TIP editor.