Help rebuild concurrency-interest archives

[Pavel Rappo]

A year ago, I was saddened to learn that the concurrency-interest
mailing list broke down irreversibly [^1]. Not only did the list stop
functioning, but its archives disappeared as well. The latter seemed
especially sad as the list hosted many interesting, in-depth
conversations over the years.

Is there a way to get some of the archives back? Many
concurrency-interest members, myself included, still have some of
those conversations in their mailboxes. Given enough members, we could
probably rebuild the archives. Maybe not completely, not in the same
form, but close.

The earliest email from concurrency-interest that I have in my mailbox
is dated 2012-01-12 and the most recent is dated 2022-08-10. Since
I've never unsubscribed from the list, we can safely say that
2022-08-10 is when the list ended.

2012 is the year I subscribed to the list, but it's not when the list
started. To get an idea on when the list started I turned to "Wayback
Machine", which showed me [^2] that the first archived email is dated
2002-01-30. So, the list was operational for more than 20 years!

I wrote a script to download the monthly "Gzip'd Text" files. The
script downloaded 168 out of 238 files. The downloaded files cover the
period from 2002-January and up to and including 2016-March, except
for 2015-January. So there's some overlap between what my mailbox has
and what "Wayback Machine" has.

In theory, combining data from my mailbox with data from "Wayback
Machine" should be more than enough to rebuild the complete archives.
However, I don't know if any of these two datasets have any quality,
completeness or some other issues.

And it's where the distributed nature of a mail list can help. I was
not the only member. Some members subscribed earlier than I did. Their
data might be used for cross-checking or filling in gaps.

__So here's the deal.__ If you've ever been a member of
concurrency-interest, reply with basic stats, such as total number of
list emails you have and the time period they cover.

And last but not least: consider donating to "Wayback Machine" today.
Maybe your company can match your donation too?

-Pavel

[^1]: https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/core-libs-dev/2024-August/127856.html
[^2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220527224446/http://cs.oswego.edu/pipermail/concurrency-interest/