Are archives of comp.lang.perl available?

    Yes, although they're poorly organized.  You can get them from the
    host ftp.ugcs.caltech.edu (131.215.128.204) to the file
    /pub/comp.lang.perl.tar.Z; this file was last modified on February 15,
    1992, and is 8.9 megabytes long.  Obviously, it's considerably out of
    date.

    These are currently stored in news- or MH-style format; there are
    subdirectories named things like "arrays", "programs", "taint", and
    "emacs".  Unfortunately, only the first ~1600 or so messages have been
    so categorized, and we're now up to almost 15000.  Furthermore, even
    this categorization was haphazardly done and contains errors.  

    Both Larry and I have maintained archives of the nearly 19,000
    messages the newsgroup has seen since its inception.  I'm currently
    looking for a home for them.  It'll take about 100 megabytes, although
    I'm on a 16k/2k filesystem, and that might be reduced somewhat by one
    with smaller frags.  Or perhaps I'll just get myself a new disk.

    They're just stored as regular files the way news does, so it's
    somewhat unmanageable.

    A more sophisticated query and retrieval mechanism is desirable.
    Preferably one that allows you to retrieve article using a fast-access
    indices, keyed on at least author, date, subject, thread (as in "trn")
    and probably keywords.  Right now, the MH pick command works for this,
    but it is very slow to select on 18000 articles.

    If you're serious about this, your best bet is probably to retrieve
    the compressed tarchive and play with what you get.  Any suggestions
    how to better sort this all out are extremely welcome.

    If you have a special request for a query on the old newsgroup
    postings, and make nice noises in my direction, I can run the query
    and send them to you.  Algebraic queries are like "find me anything
    about this and that and the other thing but not this or whozits".  I
    hope to put this in the form of a mailserver.  Donated software would
    be fine. :-)

    The fast text-retrieval query system for this I'm currently using is
    Liam Quin's excellent lqtext system, available from ftp.cs.toronto.edu
    in /pub/lq-text* .