We get numerous newbie questions whose answers can be found in the archives. These usually generate an irritated response but no answer, which means that anyone doing the right thing and searching the archives later is going to find two useless hits, making the response "use the archives" less practical than it ought to be. This is compounded by the fact that anyone searching the fedora-list archive on redhat today (2004 Sept 23) is going to run into a broken search engine, and in fact will get no answer to their question. So it seems sort of silly to tell people to use "the" archive, when in fact they should be using the aimsgroup archive for now: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=fedora-list&r=1&w=2 So the proper "enlightened irritated" response to train newbies is to give them that pointer so they can look things up (and look up Lisa's wonderful README, too). But -- putting that URL into messages itself gets put into the archive, forever. The chances that the URL will still work a year from now is low. This corrupts the archive, too. The best answer would be to get Redhat to fix their *%$#& search engine, and keep it fixed forever. The next best answer would be to create a redirect somewhere, so that it points at aimsgroup for now and redhat later, when they get their archive fixed. The default answer seems to be castigate and frustrate the newbies, and then wonder why Linux still has single digit percentages of market share. I have created a couple of redirects, currently pointed at the aimsgroup archive: http://tinyurl.com/4jjp9 http://www.keithl.com/fedora-archive But the first will link-rot if/when aimsgroup changes (no improvement there), and the second relies on my own responsiveness and uptime and longevity (I hope good, but who knows?). So, finally, the questions: 1) Can anyone offer a good redirect for the archives, that they are willing to keep current, on a site with good bandwidth, uptime, security, and longevity? 2) If such a redirect is available, will people use it, rather than just blowing off the newbies? Keith (PS: The fellow at tinyurl says that they hope to offer premium tinyurls, allowing you to edit them and choose the name. That might be the best in the long term.) -- Keith Lofstrom keithl@xxxxxxxxxx Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
