Re: RFC: Create d-user-woody, d-user-sarge maillists, deactivate d-user
I disagree with this request. See below for my reasons.
Hereon wrote:
Request For Comment on:
Enhancing the Debian mailing lists by:
Creating debian-user-woody and debian-user-sarge mailing lists,
and deactivating debian-user.
Summary:
1) The Debian user community is substantially suboptimally served
with the existence of the current debian-user list.
2) The debian-user list is _unnecessarily_ overtrafficked,
[due to it being the most likely place to ask user questions, and find
answers, regarding both Stable(Woody), and
Testing/Unstable(Sarge/Sid)]
which causes several problems for the Debian community:
a) Wasted mental effort discerning which version a message
pertains to,
b) Wasted mental effort searching for information on either
Woody or Sarge/Sid in the (currently) combined list.
It is true that there is a lot of traffic and that it is usually
necessary to specify which version of debian is being run. I sometimes
find I waste time because of the ambiguity or volume of traffic but more
often I find that messages related any version of the package are useful
because either:
* the problem I'm trying to solve doesn't depend on the package version, or
* I discover from information in response to a sarge/sid query that the
best solution is to download a backport (I run woody)
3) The Debian community would be much better served
a) by the creation now of two new mailing lists, called:
1) debian-user-woody,<snip>
2) debian-user-sarge, <snip>
b) and, perhaps, by deactivating debian-user.
This would have the effect of dividing the community into three:
* those who subscribed to just the woody list
* those who subscribed to just the sarge list
* those who subscribed to both
Ignore the third group for now, because they have essentially decided to
remain in substantially the same situation as now. So the split means
that the expertise of those in group 1 is not available to anybody
asking a question on list 2 (and presumably netiquette would prevent
even people in group 3 from posting a question to both lists). Similarly
the expertise of those in group 2 is lost to questioners on list 1.
This division will reduce the quality of answers on the lists.
I believe it will also be divisive for the community.
So I do not believe it is a good idea to create new lists as suggested.
I guess an alternative would be to require messages to contain some
fixed content about os version, enforced by the mail list software but
I'm not convinced that's worthwhile.
Regards, Dave
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