Experiment: archive links in quoted messages

Perhaps the longest of longstanding LWN reader requests is the provision of archive links for messages we quote from the mailing lists. This has been a hard request to satisfy, for a couple of reasons. One is that we have learned, the hard way, that it is best to host a copy of the message ourselves. Web archives can go away or reorganize and break links; then we get a lot of mail about non-functioning links on LWN. The other, larger reason, though, has always been a simple matter of time. Producing the LWN Kernel Page requires reading through a few dozen lists, some of which have a lot of traffic. Reading those lists through a web archive - or even just finding links to quotes messages - would slow down the process and result in less content being written. That has not been a tradeoff we have been willing to make.

But we never forgot the request. Of course, it helps that certain readers regularly remind us... Starting this week, we have a tentative solution. The Gmane archive makes it easy to read through archived lists and create URLs to them. Thanks to a bit of script hacking, many of the quoted messaged linked to in this page now have an Archive-link header pointing to the Gmane version of the message, and to Gmane's thread view as well.

This feature should be considered experimental for now; whether it is retained depends on whether readers find it useful, and whether Gmane proves to be sufficiently reliable over time. We're curious to hear whether these links are worthwhile. With luck, an ancient item can now be scratched off the "to do" list.

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