Re: FAQ: Topicality, was: Policy on code covered by patents but not compiled?
On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 11:27:18AM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Who cares how often they've posted when their complaint is just?
>
> I feel this thread borders on off-topic: it meets the legal part
> but not clearly the debian part. Personally, I killfile rather than
> complain too often about off-topic-but-related threads, but some
> don't have killfiles and flodding them out of the list weakens us.
>
> But: where is more appropriate? gnu-misc might have been OK for
> this one and freeculture lists for some others, but in general
> there's nothing serving a debian-legal-related purpose well.
I find the peripheral discussions just about as interesting as the core
topics of the list. They're so common that they've become a secondary use
of the list. As you say, there's often no better place, and besides,
when an on-topic thread spawns an off-topic one, you can't simply "move"
the off-topic thread to another list; that just doesn't work--most people
aren't going to subscribe to another list just to follow a subthread, so
it just fragments the thread.
(In some cases--though not d-legal--the related but off-topic threads
spawned by on-topic threads are the only reason I subscribe to a list.)
I manage to ignore threads I don't care about without even using a killfile
(and there are plenty of those on d-devel). I just don't see a problem
being fixed by squelching useful peripheral discussions.
--
Glenn Maynard
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