Re: Debian User List
On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 10:48:04PM +0300, David Baron wrote:
> Most recently, how much of the heavy traffic on this list has had anything to
> do with Debian? With Linux? With computers?
>
> The price of bread, love or hate Wallmart or Sponge-Bob, Ubuntu or Dell (ok U
> is a Linux distro and Dell makes computers, but...) Endless threads filling
> my mailbox with irrelevance.
>
> Its fun to touch these things a bit but I think there are limits :-)
I started using Debian with Potato. The transition to Etch will be my
third dist-upgrade between releases. I'm beginning to see a pattern.
During the freeze period, users must pretty much stop confronting real
software problems on which they really need help. The people to follow
this list with the intention of being helpful get bored. People start
telling jokes and whiling away the time in other ways.
But this time the OT seems not to degenerate into shouting about
Hitler and Nazis. I wonder, is the Debian community growing up?
I see three reasons for limiting OT:
1) OT wastes bandwidth, especially for people on narrow band connections.
2) OT wastes storage in the archive
3) OT clutters up the archive and makes finding useful stuff more difficult.
But:
3) Google search seems to address 3). at least to my satisfaction.
2) The cost of disk has dropped to the point where the cost of the
extra storage must be trivial.
Reason 1) is, however, valid, and setting up a filter for downloads
over ppp is definitely a good idea. But I wonder if the narrow band
debian-users are not also the people who actually need the most help
from this list. They might have given up on asking for instructions on
how to set this up. I think I once knew, but if I did know, I've
forgotten. Something needs to be done to help these people.
Perhaps there could be a new digest that leaves out OT threads. This
could be set up relatively quickly, I think. And, I think the OT
posters are already pretty good about marking their post OT.
OTOH, Etch will be released real soon now, and the problem will go away.
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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