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Re: Why mailing-lists? Usenet have been invented, I hear. ;-)



Kai Olsen was roused into action on 09/09/02 20:07 and wrote:
Hi all.
I'm new to the Debian way of linuxing and since changing distribution is almost as involved as getting a new OS, I decided I would follow the discussions among the Debians. From the main website I lerned that this was done via mailing-lists, so I subscribed. But when it dawned on me that I was going to get 100 mails a day I regetted it. Why on earth (to stay local) doesn't Debian move the lists to a newsserver instead ???? That way it's much easier to follow threads and only download the messages that is of interest. And if Debian does not connect to other newsservers, they will not get obnoxious groups as alt.sex or comp.microsoft.. Anyway. This is unworkable for me. Don't reply - I'm off.

For all the replies I've seen here, few seem to have read what he actually wrote. He does have a valid point - there is a high volume of email on this mailing list. For instance, I was offline for just 2 days when I moved from home to university over the weekend and when I checked my email afterwards there were well over 300 messages, most of them filtering into my debian-user folder. That is a lot of volume to have to sift through and delete if you want to preserve harddrive space, not to mention the extra time in doing so. Also, if you're not on a permanent connection, I'm sure there are bandwidth issues as well.

At any rate, all he has said is that a high-volume mailing list such as this is unworkable for him - I got the impression of him being more disappointed at not being able to access this resource in a practicable manner than anything else. Nowhere did he complain about the help or supposed lack thereof that he was getting, unlike a few others we've had in the past. I certainly don't think there's any reason to call him names or declare "good riddence" and the like.

--
David P. James
4th Year Economics Student
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/

The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV



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