Hi Eric,
>I just used this file to record a babel change, and I really like the
>overall idea and the layout.  A couple of things that occurred to me.

>- would it be desirable to have a headline property (e.g. ASSIGNEE or
>  somesuch) so that users can take responsibility of issues, and search
>  for issues to which they've been assigned.

Sounds reasonable.

>- would it be difficult to tag babel files, i.e. messages with the
>  "[babel]" marker in the headline, possibly in some automatic way,
>  again to facilitate searching and sorting.

This should be quite easy and I'll look into this.

>- regarding the links to gmane articles?
>  - this is really minor, but I personally prefer thread.gmane.org
>    based links as they show the entire thread
>  - how do we find the gmane id of a message?
>  - is there an easy way to discover/generate gmane links say from
>    information contained in an email?

I've just found out that it is indeed possible to link to
thread.gmane.org using the resolver:

http://news.gmane.org/find-root.php?message_id=<MESSAGE-ID>

Where MESSAGE-ID is the content of the message id header field.  I've
changed this here so new issues will link to thread.gmane.org.

This might answer the other two questions: It's the message id of an
email that can (and should) be used to generate a gmane link.

Simply use the URL mentioned above for thread display, or
http://mid.gmane.org/MESSAGE-ID to link to a single message.  In both
cases the message id should be hex-encoded (i.e. turning special chars
into escape sequence, @ -> %40 etc.) using `url-hexify-string'.

This function could work for Gnus to push the message id of a message
to kill-ring and clipboard:

,----
| (defun dmj/gnus-get-message-id ()
|   "Push message id of current message to killring and clipboard."
|   (interactive)
|   (when (memq major-mode '(gnus-summary-mode gnus-article-mode))
|     (let* ((header (with-current-buffer gnus-summary-buffer
| 		     (gnus-summary-article-header)))
| 	   (message-id (url-hexify-string
| 			(org-remove-angle-brackets (mail-header-id header)))))
|       (org-kill-new message-id)
|       (when (fboundp 'x-set-selection)
| 	(ignore-errors (x-set-selection 'PRIMARY message-id))
| 	(ignore-errors (x-set-selection 'CLIPBOARD message-id))))))
`----

HTH
  -- David
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