Proposal: Using Hypernews to discuss development issues

[Steve Dunham <dunham@dunham.tcimet.net>]

>From time to time, various issues come up on debian-devel, there is a
discussion, a consensus seems to be reached or the issue gets lost in
the noise, and discussion dies off without really happening.  What we
really need for resolving issues is a system that:

  * Allows the whole discussion to be seen at once (and hence allows
    the entire discussion to be archived)
  * Keeps each issue in a seperate discussion
  * Can be used via email (for people with poor or expensive
    connectivity)

I was thinking about this and realized that the free system of CGI
scripts, HyperNews, does exactly what we need.  It is a very nice,
free system for discussion groups on the web with a bidirectional email
gateway.  There are also security features, so we could restrict
posting and/or reading to developers.

The Hypernews home page is at:

  http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/hypernews.html

This page is itself a hypernews forum (look at the bottom of the
page).  

So the question is:

 What do people think? Would this improve Debian's ability to discuss
 issues? 


Steve
dunham@cps.msu.edu