Greg Folkert wrote:
This is a fine example of Forums not working. It is a very nice try, and has a lot of merit, but it is another place where the signal to noise ratio is pretty ugly at best. Regardless as to how bad it is here, it really does have what people need when they need it.
The problem with forums is that you have to deal with them using a browser. All the work on sorting and following the debates is on you. But with mailing list you use a mail agent like Icedove for example, which does all the sorting of threads, which you can mark, put in folders, mark as rubbish,... This way you can also easily ignore all the lengthy [OT] if you want, so I don't understand the people complaining so heatedly about this. IMHO this is a nice sociological insight into Debian community, leisurely reading material for times you have nothing else or better to do. I think that some [OT] is healthy for community, because it shows the "other" side of the people usually participating in technical debates and most of time (from the newbie point of view) talking about the code and in code. As Greg brilliantly said in his first post, now it is time for chit chat. Enjoy it, since soon you will not have time to do it :-)I am sorry if the itchin' for Etch has some of us babbling... but that will change once Etch migrates to Stable.