Introduction to EPICS Core-talk Archive

[Andrew Johnson <anj@aps.anl.gov>]

Core-talk is a new searchable email archive, intended primarily for use by 
the EPICS core developers but accessible to all EPICS users.
We have all kinds of email discussions about internal issues during 
development, and these are usually addressed to a limited set of people 
who are likely to be interested in the discussion.  It is sometimes 
necessary to bring someone else into a conversation that has been going on 
for some time, and we need to bring that person up to speed on what has 
been said so far.  It may be that a few weeks or months later we may wish 
to refer back to an email conversation that happened, but we never saved 
the messages.
If you're like me you save some of these core discussion messages, but not 
necessarily all of them, just in case you wanted to get back to them, but 
by now your email folders are bulging with a large number of messages 
which you're not sure you're ever going to read again.  They may contain 
interesting and/or important archaeological information though, so you're 
reluctant to discard them.
Core-talk is my answer to this.  The email address core-talk@aps.anl.gov 
is set up as an email archive engine which is accessible through the EPICS 
website.  EPICS core developers are encouraged to cc: this address for all 
messages associated with EPICS internals and other limited-readership 
topics which might be of interest to other developers in the future.  If 
you do that, you should never need to forward copies of several messages 
to someone who got missed out of the cc: list in the earlier parts of a 
discussion, you can just refer them to the core-talk archives.  If a 
message is already going to tech-talk though, there's obviously little 
point in also sending it to core-talk.
Core-talk is not a mailing list so you can't subscribe to it, it just does 
archiving (I could turn it into one, but I don't think that would be as 
useful).  We will still be able to limit the immediate readership of our 
technical discussions to those people we want feedback from, but we'll end 
up with a more open process because we're not excluding others from the 
discussions completely.
I'm in two minds whether to seed core-talk from the pile of old messages 
that I have saved.  It wouldn't be hard to do that from one person's 
private archive, but I don't have the tools to exclude the duplicates that 
would result from combining a series of developers' histories.  Comments 
and suggestions are welcome.
I hope you will make use of this facility.  Note that I am likely to add 
some messages to the archive myself if I receive a copy and I feel they 
would be appropriate to appear there, but it's easier if the original 
author adds the cc: core-talk@aps.anl.gov instead.
- Andrew Johnson
--
"Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon