Re: Automatic linking to a mhonarc archive

[Earl Hood <earl@earlhood.com>]

On August 10, 2002 at 21:12, Alan Burlison wrote:

> I've come to the conclusion that what I want isn't that sensible anyway - I
> can just create a resource variable with the html link in it and then stick
> that on the generated pages as normal.

I did not fully realize that you were trying to create a link in
the subject text itself.  I agree that having a custom resource
variable is better.

> What might be more generally useful is a way of overriding the 'sort by
> subject' function - for example in my case I could look in the subject for a
> bugid, so that mails would sort as I require even if the bugid wasn't the
> first word in the subject.

The current code base is not abstracted well enough to make this
clean.  It would require knowing some internals.  Also, and maybe
more important, is the sorting would be slow.  You'd probably have to
pre-extract bug id information and sort on that to avoid extracting
the bug id everytime a key comparison is done.  If you look at the
sort_messages() routine in mhutil.pl, you will see that I do some
pre-processing before the actual sort for subject- and author-based
sorting to minimize the comparison computation during the sort.

A potential hack is to actual modify the subject as before, but instead
of trying to put a hyperlink in it, you prefix it with the relevant
bug id.  This way, if you do a subject sort, you may get the kind
of grouping you desire.

--ewh

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