cygwin and cygwin-xfree lists to merge

[Larry Hall (Cygwin X)]

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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