Re: How does anyone keep up with this list?
follower@acm.njit.edu (John Rizzo) writes:
>
> Hey guys.. I would like to start helping with debian in any way possible.
> I have been haning out on this list for a while to see how everything
> works with you guys. My only question is how does anyone ever keep up
> with this list. Its huge and every day I check the list and after getting
> through reading everything that has been posted I stop for a little while
> and there are a ton of messages again. I know I could use filters and
> stuff. Is that how everyone else monitors the list?
I pipe all of my mailing lists into a private INN news server. Then I read
them as if they were newsgroups.. GNUS (along with almost any newsreader)
helps you follow individual threads pretty well, and it is easy to pick a few
things to read and then c)atch up to skip everything else. And if I subscribe
to something but am not interested enough to follow it all the time, I just
don't read it. All articles expire after two weeks (or whatever you set).
If you do this, take care to avoid loops (in particular pay careful attention
to how you might post a message to the list, consider bypassing the news
server entirely). I have a cron job that fetches my mail once an hour, and
through a careless misconfiguration managed to repost the same message to the
GPG list every hour for half a day..
Catching the highlights of a few well-spoken or highly-clued individuals helps
a lot too. If I see a well-known name involved in a discussion, I'll read
their messages and see what parts of the other messages they've quoted. GNUS
let's you do pretty complex scoring (which I must admit I've never used) to
highlight messages by a given author, messages with certain words inside, etc.
I usually start threads with the second message, assuming that they'll only
quote the important parts of the original one.
In short, find a method that makes it easy to skip as much as possible.
Firehoses are meant to be sipped.
cheers,
-Brian
warner@lothar.com
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