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Re: [News] Linux Reciprocity is a Major Merit

__/ [ Mark Kent ] on Friday 16 March 2007 08:23 \__

> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> __/ [ Mark Kent ] on Thursday 15 March 2007 16:28 \__
>> 
>>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>>> Giving Back [to Linux]
>>>> 
>>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>>| My contribution to Vector Linux is quite small even when compared to
>>>>| some of the other volunteer packagers. It?s minuscule compared to
>>>>| the core developers. The point is that the strength of the Open
>>>>| Source community is that lots of people give back and contribute
>>>>| what they can. Lots of little contributions make a huge impact.
>>>> `----
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/03/post_3.html
>>>> 
>>>> [H]omer, for example, builds RPMs for Fedora. And look what we have as a
>>>> result:
>>>> 
>>>> Four good reasons to switch to RHEL 5
>>>> 
>>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>>| Sometimes you don't want the hassle of the big upgrade. For example,
>>>>| there is no good reason to "upgrade" Windows to Vista. On the other
>>>>| hand, there are upgrades like Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) that
>>>>| give you some darn good reasons to make the jump.
>>>> `----
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS6991009676.html
>>> 
>>> I would suggest that the [News] postings provide a useful service into
>>> the Community, too.  In fact, I suspect that if you were to google all
>>> the digests, you'd have more linux-related news URLs than any amount of
>>> manual googling would bring.  I have noticed though that some of the
>>> older references seem to disappear in the end.  Perhaps we should be
>>> saving whole articles somewhere?
>> 
>> If the URL merely changes, then doing a Web search with the title/snippet
>> should bring up a mirror/identical article. Some time ago OpenAddict moved
>> from one CMS to another and many URLs broke. I sent an E-mail to the
>> Webmaster and this will be corrected, but I agree that we can't rely on
>> the Internet Archive (Wayback Time Machine) and search engines cache. One
>> option is to save every page before I post it (CTRL+S+ENTER), but it
>> doesn't make the previous links live. It also doesn't make it public. It
>> does, on the other hand, allow me to grep back to life any article which I
>> post here. Those who volunteered in Groklaw and Slashdot did a huge favour
>> to society, IMHO. The deposition tapes, for example, were immortalised by
>> a Groklawian who chose to remain anonymous.
> 
> I suppose I could start storing/hosting stuff here.  These are only text
> articles anyway, so the storage requirement would not be vast.
> 
>> 
>> Maybe one day we'll have 'monopoly deniers' (now they have 'climate
>> deniers', with the negative connotation), so all this evidence is very
>> important. It will help write history properly, going past the scope of
>> Gates' 'Museum of Computing' and charitable work (READ: investment).
>> 
> 
> Indeed, and I remain somewhat concerned that although we get to keep the
> short snippets of articles in google and elsewhere, we might be losing
> the originals.

True. We should learn from history that when evidence goes away, people
conveniently ignore the past. I suggest we make use of a tool that parses
[News]-tagged posts, extracts the URLs, and then curls/wgets them
systematically, maybe putting them under a directory that's named just like
the msg-id. I would have gladly implemented this if I was any good with Perl
parsing, but it sounds like you could reuse a lot from your current
digest-generating script. You already pick up the tags to isolate some posts
from the rest and then extract values from the messages headers. Since
information excess is not a major issue (it's just arhiving), then just
wgetting everything (even tinyurl's and related posts) which begins with
"http" might actually work. If the formatting of the posts needs to change,
that'll be a non-issue, but I also make it convenient for Ed to parse as he
creates local copies on his BSD server.

-- 
                ~~ Best wishes 

Roy S. Schestowitz      |    "Oops. My brain just hit a bad sector"
http://Schestowitz.com  |     GNU/Linux     |     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
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