[avr-chat] Keeping posts of particular interest

[Juergen Harms]

The replies on PWM in the avr-gcc list make me warm up an old 
discussion: how can a selection of information from the avr-gcc and 
avr-chat mailing lists be distilled into something with a less ephemeral 
visibility and easier to access (search, sort) than an entry in an email 
archive?

The most recent discussion a few months ago considered to have a wiki 
(with the question whether existing wikis could be used) or to enhance 
the Doxygen generated documentation - both suffering from the problem of 
resources, and that it is difficult to make this kind of solution 
survive due to the need of a sustained effort to keep them alive.

Personally, I use a half-way work-around (and I guess others do the same 
thing): I simply collect email items that I think of possible future 
interest in a local email folder. Could such a solution be generalised?

Just to provoke a discussion, here is the outline of an approach: (1) 
create a mailbox with an archive that has public access; (2) send 
messages that are worth-while keeping to that mailbox; (3) find an 
understanding on what is "worth-while keeping" - for instance, messages 
in which the original poster of a problem (if he does not, somebody 
else) sums up the essential results; (4) there could be some guidelines 
to respect, for instance to make sure that the subject line is clear and 
useful as a search-key, and possibly add a link to the corresponding 
thread in the archive; (5) this mailbox could be structured to have a 
system of (sub-)folders, but there we might be back to the need for a 
moderator.

Creating a mailbox and maintaining it should not be too difficult: when 
somebody submits a problem and gets it solved (or ends up with a no-go 
conclusion) he will be motivated to do the summing up - that is a 
one-time action and does not require sustained effort. At least 
primitive tools for searching a mailbox exist. That is far from perfect, 
but much better than nothing.

What do you think?

I have seen messages with references like Re: AVR-chat Digest, Vol xxx, 
issue yyy go by. Is that already something in this direction - what is 
AVR-chat Digest?

Juergen