The caml-list currently seems to be hosted via the usual Sympa instance of INRIA (https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list), however going to the page shows the following red pop-up:
AUTHORIZATION REJECT (arc) Web archives are restricted to list subscribers and local domain users. If you are subscribed to the list with a different email address, you should either use that other email address or update your list membership with the new email address.
You need to login
After closing the pop-up, the link to the archive is greyed-out.
I also can’t find any other public archives.
Is the archive now meant to be hidden to non-logged-in users, or is that some sort of new default behaviour of the mailing-list software that might have changed after an update?
As far as I know, this change is not expected. Probably a good idea to ping the caml-list maintainers (@xavierleroy?).
Incidentally, until a few years ago I had maintained a mirror of caml-list using public-inbox which unfortunately did not survive some infrastructure changes that affected the machine it was hosted in.
I’m also interested by such archive. One of the goal of our cooperative is to publish a website which will contains the full archive of the caml-list. Even if this list is not very active, it is a good resource for OCaml (and it may also be of interest in understanding certain historical choices related to OCaml).
Yes, the caml-list archives are currently restricted to subscribers, you need to log in to sympa.inria.fr with your subscriber identifiers to see it. That was a request from the sysadmins of sympa.inria.fr, who are seeing huge traffic spikes from rogue bots indexing the public mailing list archives.
The caml-list has been essentially dead for the last 10 years at least, with just a few release announcements, a ton of call for papers, and zero discussions. At this point, I’m not sure it is worth archiving at all.
And also the very useful mirror of the source messages from the caml-list archives that @nojb put together; GitHub - nojb/caml-list (in the master branch).
It would be a nice project for someone to create a static HTML archive of the caml-list, as that would be much easier to host than the active version.
Hello, I am pleased to announce the launch of https://caml-list.robur.coop/, a unikernel that provides a search engine for the caml-list. We now have public access to this archive !
Our cooperative is currently working on several fronts, including email, by offering an archiving system. For more details, please see this article. Another article describes the search engine we use, and a third explains how we developed this unikernel (although the latter has evolved considerably since then, the core remains the same).
We are therefore delighted to make this service available to the community, and if you would like to help us improve it, the project is currently available here. We would like to thank NLnet for funding this unikernel, and if you appreciate our work, please do not hesitate to make a donation to our cooperative (via GitHub or directly to our cooperative)
Finally, this example also showcases all our work on unikernels: from what an Ethernet frame is, through the archive system and the extraction of emails from a virtualised hard drive, right up to the HTTP request - everything is done in OCaml (and we would once again recommend reading our tutorial on mnet if you would like to build up unikernels).
So have fun hunting for relics from the history of OCaml!
Search is a nice feature but i feel like – especially for email archives – a per-thread (list-like structure) view ordered by date is a must. Is your service a simple showcase for the search unikernel or are you planning on going that direction in the future?
Reading the articles quickly i couldn’t find if the search feature does or is planned to have a “search language” (e.g. from:<author>). Is this kind of feature there and/or planned?
Another article shows an extension of our archive system to have a “per-thread” (as you described) view into our blaze tool. I think we have the possibility to extend blame to have such view (where bancos is compatible with unikernels). We need to focus on some others projects (still related to emails) but just put an issue will be good for us to keep such feature in mind.
That’s great @dinosaure! I understand that this is mostly a showbox of interesting technologies completely built in OCaml, with features/usability not its main concern.
On an unrelated subject: the mailing list has been dormant for so many years now, I wonder if it wouldn’t be time to acknowledge that, shut it down and make the archives available in some easy-to-share form.
I was idly wondering about doing the opposite recently: writing a script to archive GitHub issue discussions and this Discourse forum and converting them to mbox format and combine them with the historical caml-list archives.
Having a 30 year old mbox file for quickly searching through things works well for my personal email: I use notmuch for this. It might also be very convenient to avoid having to use the increasingly unreliable GitHub search functionality!
!