Re: How to make Emacs popular again.

[Kévin Le Gouguec]

Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> On 28.09.2020 06:45, Richard Stallman wrote:
>>    > Here's a simple example:
>>    >
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00842.html
>> Referring to messages that way is inconvenient for me.  The message
>> is
>> in my saved mail, but I cannot find it with that info.  Would you
>> please send message IDs instead?  I can search for that.
>
> Too bad. Perhaps the generated HTML should include something unique in
> the urls to help refer to. Not sure what, though. You can't easily
> read a website. My email client can't search by message ID.

FWIW, public-inbox includes message IDs both in URLs and among the
headers displayed on the page[1].  See for example:

https://orgmode.org/list/E1kIPh1-0001Lu-Rg@fencepost.gnu.org/


For lists.gnu.org archives, in case that helps anyone, here is what I
use to automate the "MHonArc URL → message ID" translation:

#+begin_src elisp
(defun mhonarc-to-messageid (url)
  "Retrieve the Message-ID from an article archived on MHonArc."
  (interactive
   (list
    (let* ((default (or (thing-at-point-url-at-point)
                        (and (derived-mode-p 'eww-mode)
                             (shr-url-at-point nil))))
           (prompt (if default
                       (format "URL? (%s) " default)
                     "URL? ")))
      (read-string prompt nil nil default))))
  (with-current-buffer (url-retrieve-synchronously url)
    (search-forward-regexp "^<!--X-Message-Id: \\(.+\\) -->$")
    (message (xml-substitute-numeric-entities (match-string 1)))))
#+end_src

(Requires being online, of course.)


[1] Among other nice qualities (comes with an NNTP server, can display
    all messages in a thread on a single HTML page, licensed under the
    AGPL).  Sales pitch over at:
    https://public-inbox.org/public-inbox.git/about/