This message was forwarded to the sysadmins of the boost list; Dave asked me to reply here on the list. I am not on the boost list; please CC me on any replies. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 16:02:35 -0500 From: David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> Subject: Re: [Osl-sysadmin] Care to respond? On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, David Abrahams wrote:
This showed up on the Boost list...
All the "next in thread" type links I've seen have been internally consistent. Unfortunately, this renumbering almost certainly means that external references to the old URL for a given message (e.g. on another mailing list or newsgroup) will be wrong. From what I've seen of Google's old links, you usually get a different message, not the one you expected and not a HTTP 404 for instance.
Yup -- definitely an unfortunate side-effect.
It might have been (or still be) a good idea to invalidate completely the old style URLS to avoid confusion.
In consultation with David, we decided not to do this in order to not break all the external (non-search-engine/self-healing) links.
Better still would have been to support both the old and new numberings in parallel, since you can't know what references exist for the old URLs.
So I thought that we had restored the old numbering, and I thought that Larry (the OSL sysadmin) had checked that. Is there something other than Google (which will eventually fix itself) that is pointing to an incorrect address? -- {+} Jeff Squyres {+} jsquyres@osl.iu.edu {+} Research Associate, Open Systems Lab, Indiana University {+} http://www.osl.iu.edu/