cygwin and cygwin-xfree lists to merge

[Larry Hall (Cygwin X)]

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.
> 
> Do you have an opinion either way, Gary?
> 
> 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.

-- 
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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