Re: small but useful patches for text search

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> I did offer to post my mbox file so people could see what I have as open
> 8.4 items, but the "no complaining" requirement seems to have eliminated
> volunteers.

IIRC, the biggest problem we had last time (apart from the
complaining) was that there was no easy way to refer to particular
items in the list. If you could find a way to make the numbering
stable (first 8 characters of the SHA-1 hash of the contents, a la
git? drop every message into a file whose name is the initial number
of that messages, and keep the numbers the same as files are
removed?), it would be easier for people tell you which items could be
removed and why. I think you suggested referencing by subject lines
last time, but the problem is that you had so many duplicates that it
was hard to explain which ones should be kept and which one should be
left, especially because you were making a lot of edits at the same
time (subject A three down from subject B ceases to be clear when
subject B has in the meantime been removed, or when one of the
intervening messages has been removed, thus making the one three down
a different message with the same subject).

Lest I be accused of offering suggestions in place of actual help, if
you send me whatever script you're using to put this on the web now I
would be willing to take a crack at making the changes described
above. I really don't believe dumping everything into an mbox file is
the best way of keeping track of open to-do items - but if that's the
only choice, then we might as well try to make it as painless as
possible. (I offered to write a webapp to attempt to improve upon the
CommitFest wiki a while ago, so we could eventually do things like...
run a command to dump the latest version of every outstanding patch
into a given directory... and a whole lot of people offered
suggestions for features... but I haven't been able to connect up
with Magnus, so that's gone nowhere.)

...Robert