[ros-users] Idea for wiki macro -- link to mailing list threads

[Patrick Bouffard]

It's often the case that for some particular item on the wiki there is
much more information available in discussions in the mailing lists,
though it's not practical (or even a good idea) to add all that detail
to the wiki itself. As the list archives grow however it's becoming
harder to find relevant information by a simple keyword search.

We can currently link to wiki pages from the mailing list simply by
pasting in the appropriate URL. Could we also enable the reverse, with
a wiki macro that links to the lurker archive of a particular thread?
Similar to the bug tracker macro. So something like:

<<Lurker(THREAD_ID)>>

e.g.,

<<Lurker(d2ff88fe)>>

.. would expand to:

https://code.ros.org/lurker/search/20380101.000000.00000000@th:d2ff88fe.en.html

And would be rendered with something like *[ML], where * is a little
envelope icon or something like that.

Then in the wiki we can add these links pointing to discussion threads
that are relevant to that part of the wiki. This could include threads
on ros-developers that relate to design decisions, or threads on
ros-users that have some detailed discussion on some feature.

I'm not sure if this is technically possible, but perhaps the mailing
list could even be configured so that the lurker thread id is printed
at the bottom of every message to make it dead easy to know what
thread id to use.


Cheers,
Pat