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Re: Too many mailing lists


On 6/21/2014 05:51, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
On Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 03:07:37PM -0600, Warren Young wrote:
Every time someone says "That's not on topic here, go elsewhere," it
can easily be read as "Go away."

I've never seen a reply saying "that's not on topic here, go away"

I said "go elsewhere," with the *implication* of "go away."

As for an example, here you go:

    https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-patches/2014-q2/msg00027.html

What I see is "please take this to the
correct list", with the occasional person who can't follow that explicit
instruction being unsubscribed or banned from the list in question.

I've been on the Cygwin mailing lists since 2001 and I *still* haven't fully internalized all the rules, which should tell you something about how clear and easy to apply they are.

There's about 1,800 words on the page laying out the rules for posting. That's two or three newspaper articles' worth. Do you have that memorized, or do you just re-read it before posting each time?

rely
on other users giving their emails easy-to-filter subject lines.  That's
much easier for people to get wrong than working out which mailing list
to use.

You're already relying on people to post to the right mailing list today, which also has problems.

I don't use X.  It's an easy and obvious thing to filter out, and it
means I don't have my inbox filled with posts about X when I simply
don't care about it.

Shall we segregate discussions of Emacs, too, since Vim is a bit more popular? [1] How about TeX, on the theory that most people use word processors instead? Maybe slice off development tool user discussions, since most Cygwin users are not developers?

There are about 5,800 packages in Cygwin today. [2] How fine do you want to dice it?

Most users won't care about app packaging.

Yes, and most of those will be developers of some stripe or another, so if we all go off to the Cygwin developer list, those regular users will continue to not be bothered.

I only have so many hours in each day, and I like to keep abreast of the
bits of Cygwin I'm interested in.  Amalgamating the lists would increase
the noise in my inbox without increasing the interesting content, or
would require me to set up complex filtering rules that would rely on
folk correctly describing their problems in their first email, which
seems like no less effort than picking the right mailing list in the
first place.

I subscribe to most of the Cygwin mailing lists, and I can tear through the uninteresting bits in about 10 seconds a day by pressing 'n' in my mail reader a bunch of times.


[1] http://www.moolenaar.net/vim.html#awards
[2]  http://goo.gl/LGzusr


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