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Re: cygwin and cygwin-xfree lists to merge
Christopher Faylor wrote:
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 02:33:21PM -0500, Larry Hall (Cygwin X) wrote:
Christopher Faylor wrote:
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 04:00:43AM -0600, Gary R. Van Sickle wrote:
From: Christopher Faylor
The historical reasons for [un?]merging the cygwin and cygwin-xfree
lists no longer seems to exist so I am contemplating merging the two
lists.
For us old-timers, what were the historical reasons again, and why/how
did they go away?
Good question. My email records don't go back far enough to know for
sure and I don't see anything telling in the mailing list archives. I
think that one of the early maintainers (maybe Suhaib Siddiqi) didn't
want to read the cygwin list to look for cygwin-xfree questions.
Yes, I remember that.
I believe I was actually somewhat reluctant to do the split because (I
know this will be hard to believe) I thought there would be end-user
confusion that would require a lot of "use the other list" shuttling.
OTOH, maybe I was actively insisting on it and relishing the chance to
tell people they were off-topic.
I'm just proposing this now because Yaakov asked about it and Jon
indicated that he would be ok with it. Yaakov obviously reads both
lists and he has observed that the lines are sometimes blurred between
what's a X question and what isn't.
Another thing that occurred to me is that we could keep the two lists
and stop telling people that they *had* to ask questions about X here.
True. The downside there is there would exist an artificial split
where some discussion would happen only on Cygwin-X while others would
happen on the main list. This would be tough to keep track of and be a
stumblling block for newbies who might actually look in the archives
for answers. If there is a goal to maintain the idea of two lists
while really having only one, what about having the Cygwin-X list exist
as a "head" only. It would be similar to the announce lists in that it
would forward all email to the main list but would be different in that
there would be no separate list archive. I'm not sure how easy it
would be to set something like this up but it would address the
concerns some have expressed about filtering out the main Cygwin list
info.
I could do the cygwin-xfree -> cygwin mirroring fairly easily and even
prepend a "[X11]" to the subject. Going in the other direction would
require more work. And, it seems like that would start to make things
more complicated.
We could adopt a convention of prepending [X11] or [Xorg] in front of
X-related messages but I'm sure that people who don't want to see
traffic wouldn't consider that an acceptable alternative to a separate
mailing list.
Yep, good point. On thinking about this again, I realize that my
suggestion doesn't really address the "I only want to see the X
messages" crowd, since people could still (and maybe would feel
encouraged to) just send email to the main list and thereby
bypass those only on the X list (which I believe was the point
you were trying to address with the mention of mirroring from
the main list to the X list.) So, in retrospect, it's a dumb
idea! Sorry for the noise.
--
Larry Hall http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc. (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
216 Dalton Rd. (508) 429-6305 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746
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