[GNUnet-developers] Search wildcards, and the mail archive

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

Hi!
 I've been watching GNUnet on and off for a fair while now, but
this is my first posting to the list.

 Tracy R Reed was asking recently about using things like
wildcards in searches, which is sort of similar to something I'd
been thinking of, about "informal protocols".

 I'd already sort of guessed that GNUnet probably wasn't able to
return every file stored on a node, but I'd wondered about using
specific keywords such as "SOMETHING" or "ANYTHING" or "WHATEVER"
to give files so that they would be likely to turn up if a user
just wanted some sort of a broad sample of various things (sort of
like the test content, but more the sort of things that people
might want)- or maybe things that people thought were worth getting.

 Obviously this sort of thing doesn't count as part of the actual
GNUnet software, but it occurred to me that this and numerous other
ideas could be considered to be "informal protocols", rather like
the way that most software (even non-free software) contains a
file "README" or "README.TXT" even though the absence of it (or it
having a different name) wouldn't stop it being usable software.

 Whilst informal protocols aren't set in stone and don't strictly
need to be adhered to, it does help to have them and decide on
good ones, I feel.

I'd like to get back to that subject later (if no-one minds!), but
first, I think it's much more important to point out the fact that
since December, the mailing-list archive seems to be mucked up: I
noticed that after Jan Marco Alkema's email about using SQL databases
(no comment), only the latest message sent to the list would ever
be shown, and all the others would seem to have vanished.
 The November archive seems to still have its messages visible.

 Is this a bug in the archive displaying code, or are old messages
vanishing (maybe due to going over a disk quota??)

Sorry if this issue is already known, if there have been messages on
the subject before, I've not seen them, as they're not visible in
the archive :P

 Tom Barnes-Lawrence