(From my thoughts on svn community development:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SVN/What%27s+In+My+Head#What'sInMyHead-Integratearchives/logs,permalinks,searching
)
Problem: Past communications are scattered across systems and storage
locations, with no consistent archives or permalinks, so cross-referencing is
difficult and non-permanent. Our issue tracker and wiki provide only links that
are tied to their current provider technology.
The types of information include:
Short-form chat (IRC) archives: Matrix-Static, irclogger, ASF Wilderness
IRC logs.
Email/forum archives: haxx.se, ASF Pony Mail, the old Tigris lists. (The
old Tigris mailing-lists system used to provide a permalink to the archived
version at the bottom of each mail delivered.)
Issue Tracker: the current Jira issues, the old issuezilla.
Wiki pages: the current Confluence, the old MoinMoin.
An important step is to develop a URL "permalink" scheme to refer to our
various resources. These would be technology-ignorant URLs, all under
subversion.apache.org, like "/issue/1234".
A baby step is the '.message-ids.tsv' file in our web site directory, holding a
mapping from haxx archive URLs used in our web pages to email message ids, with
(in the commit log message) a script to generate it. There is, as yet, no
automation to use the mapping in any way.
Initial tasks:
start documenting a URL-space map for our resources
populate one entry, e.g. "/issue/<number> → issue <number>"
implement some simple automated handling (e.g. redirects) for that
well, well... we already have this in our .htaccess which covers that
exact case along with some aliases:
"RedirectMatch ^/issue[^A-Za-z0-9]?(\d+)$
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SVN-$1";
start using it: update existing direct links to point here instead;
publicize it
Deeper integration: A permalink URL should not merely redirect the user to its
technology-specific target URL, but present the target in such a way that other
inbound and outbound URLs also use the permalink form. With a big third-party
system like Jira or Confluence the feasibility of that is going to depend
entirely on whether the system has built-in support for that usage.
--
- Julian
