Too many mailing lists

[Warren Young]

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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