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Old Nabble SQLite mailing list site down?
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Old Nabble SQLite mailing list site down?

(1) By anonymous on 2021-08-05 05:30:21 [link] [source]

http://sqlite.1065341.n5.nabble.com/ hasn’t resolved for over 24h.

I know that this is the new forum, but there was a lot of good information on the old mailing list. (And now a lot of links are dead.) Are there any plans to retain the old posts for reference?

(2) By Simon Slavin (slavin) on 2021-08-05 14:12:04 in reply to 1 [link] [source]

Nabble was never a part of the SQLite infrastructure. The organisation subscribed to the mailing list and made it available on the web, but it did this to numerous mailing lists on different subjects. If you feel it provides a useful service you might approach the people who run Nabble with your concerns.

As far as preserving all posts from the old mailing list, and making them available for search on the web, I'm not sure it's a good idea. They refer to increasingly antiquated versions of SQLite, and many of the answers are now simply not true. For instance, WAL mode was introduced in 2010. Many posts on the mailing list discuss solutions and workarounds which are now not needed, because WAL does it all simpler and better. There have been other significant changes to SQLite and surrounding technologies (e.g. solid state storage rather than spinning hard disks) and some old questions would now be answered very differently.

(3) By Simon Willison (simonw) on 2021-08-07 19:42:02 in reply to 2 [link] [source]

I always find those kinds of conversations useful, provided they are clearly presented in context. The deeper my relationship with a piece of software gets the more I find myself running into questions that can best be answered by conversations that were had many years previously, against much older versions of the software.

I'd love to see the old mailing list content available online in an archive that includes a prominent "Warning: this conversation from 2009 relates to a 12 year old version of the software" warning, rather than leaving that content entirely unavailable.

(4) By Richard Hipp (drh) on 2021-08-07 20:56:13 in reply to 3 [link] [source]

One of the arguments in favor of switching from a traditional mailing list to this forum (a switch that received considerable push-back) is that historical conversations are preserved, in a searchable format, and can be easily replicated using "fossil clone".

This is one of the advantages of Fossil over Git. You have the ability to keep historic conversations about the code together with the code and in an easy to use and easy to preserve format. Yes, I now I keep this forum in a separate repository from the SQLite source code. But I could combine them. Maybe I will someday. And certainly many of the smaller projects I manage do keep the forum and source code and tickets and all the rest together in the same repository so that by cloning the repository, you get the full historical context of the project.

One commentator recently observed that Git really is "distributed", but not in a good way: "You go here for version control, and this other place for wiki, and over at this third place for the mailing list, and ...."

(5) By J.M. Aranda (JMAranda) on 2021-08-08 08:31:13 in reply to 1 [link] [source]

Assuming a normal statistical distribution of the 10^12 installations among the 3xnxm published versions, high values ​​are obtained for any version.
Embedded software is not easy to update, it is tied to hardware. Engineers hate to change it. Military engineers still love the Jovial and Ada languages.
Gambling a system for a new functionality?
(I suspect GE is using it in secret nuclear facilities).
Each version consists of thousands of lines of code + comments. That requires to be conserved.
I have updated a number of control systems and all the information found has always been very valuable to me.
Now only open source is valued. But that produces some successes and quite a few failures.
SQLite is high quality software. That must be protected and preserved.
In addition, the US Congress praises it as a format for preserving documents.
Perhaps the Forum could be packaged in a bd.
At the end of each year, for example.

(6) By Simon Slavin (slavin) on 2021-08-08 12:41:59 in reply to 5 [link] [source]

There is a good argument for preserving all messages from the email forum intact, as text files (or possibly MBOX format), probably ZIPped. Those interested could download the whole thing, expand it, and search it on their equipment.

My problem was making the messages searchable via standard websearch toolls, for people who don't check the dates on the results shown, and don't know that SQLite gets substantial changes very frequently. Though I like the suggestion upthread of including a highly visible messages like "WARNING: This is an old answer and applies to an old version of SQLite. It may not apply to the version you're using.".

(7) By J.M. Aranda (JMAranda) on 2021-08-08 14:39:28 in reply to 6 [link] [source]

The support service of many database vendors, 
always requires the versions and configurations of all your software, 
and that you send them a copy and dump of everything. 
Including licenses and support agreements.

Here you could well ask for the version number.
They are supposed to refer to the most recent.
But the time passes fast.

(8) By tom (younique) on 2021-08-13 09:26:43 in reply to 1 [source]

After the old mailing list was abandoned, I downloaded all messages for my own reference. There have been many good threads which still help me today.

If anyone is interested, I can provide the archive. It's 320 MB zipped.

Maybe even one of the admins has an interested in converting/migrating these topics into fossil. It should easily be convertible using a small script.