[PATCH] Re: Improving List Archive Searching

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Randall R Schulz wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I would like to suggest and request that "cygcheck -s" output not be
> included in the body of postings to the Cygwin mailing list. Because that
> output includes a list of packages, DLLs and key executables, including it
> in the body of a message can cause many false hits when searching the list
> archives for message pertinent to a particular program, package or library.
> For this reason, I believe it's distinctly preferable to place that output
> in an attachment.
>
> Perhaps when cygcheck output is solicited in pursuit of a problem diagnosis
> the person requesting that output could include a reminder of the
> preference for placing that output in an attachment?
>
> I don't think this is the sort of thing to enforce the way UCE is blocked
> and that merely suggesting this change in practice won't eliminate it even
> if everyone were to agree, but if we could start to shift the general
> practice regarding posting of cygcheck output to one of preferring
> attachments, it would improve the "signal-to-noise" ratio for those putting
> in the effort of searching for answers already extant in the list archives
> before posting.
>
> Randy

I agree with the sentiment, and I guess other people do too, since I've
noticed a lot of new messages explicitly mentioning the attachment.
However, the FAQ and the bug reporting page need to be updated, as people
looking there receive conflicting instructions.  Attached are patches to
bugs.html and src/winsup/doc/how-resources.texinfo.  The FAQ will need to
be regenerated once the second patch is applied.  The patches will
probably need to be applied to different CVS subtrees, sorry.  Oh, and
they probably don't need ChangeLog entries, do they?

On a separate note, I wasn't able to check out the cygwin webpages using
anoncvs, so I had to use WebCVS and wget.  I tried 'cvs -d
:pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/cygwin checkout htdocs', and the
error I got was

cvs checkout: authorization failed: server sources.redhat.com rejected access to /cvs/cygwin for user anoncvs
cvs checkout: used empty password; try "cvs login" with a real password

It's not essential that I'm able to check this out, but it would be good
to know whether I'm doing it right or I've screwed up somewhere.
	Igor
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"Water molecules expand as they grow warmer" (C) Popular Science, Oct'02, p.51

Attachment: bugshtml_cygcheck_attachment.patch
Description: Text document

Attachment: howresources_cygcheck_attachment.patch
Description: Text document

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