Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 23 Jan 1998 21:49:13 -0500 | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: where is everyone or is linux stable ? |
| |
From: "Adam J. Richter" <adam@yggdrasil.com> Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 15:04:22 -0800
There was a problem with spam flowing in the usenet->mail direction of the gateway, but I would certainly like to see flow restored in the mail->news direction. I think it would attract more code development again and would make it easier for people to get answers about "what's the status of foo" without needing to using the time of human contributors as much.
There are a couple of problems I see with gatewaying mail to Usenet.
The first is that spammer's *do* seem to harvest e-mail addresses that are sent to Usenet, whereas this doesn't seem to happen quite as much with private mailing lists.
Although you may think that's a problem that it takes a certain amount of effort to subscribe to linux-kernel, or set up your own private news gateway, I actually consider it a feature. We need a forum where it takes some minimal amount of clue to discover its existence. Otherwise, the list gets swamped with clueless posters who are asking simple questions or proposing completely hopeless feature requests, and "you should do this". While we had the gateway in place, it was a case of non-stop amatuer hour.
We already have the Usenix group comp.os.linux.development.system. If you don't like it because not enough of the hackers don't hang out there, you don't fix it by bringing the linux-kernel mailing list down to the level of c.o.l.d.s.
Granted, a one-way gateway might keep out some of the truely clueless, but it still makes the mailing list a little too obvious for the clueless AOL users to find, and once they find it, I have no doubt they will figure out how to post to the list.
This is how the views of the membership of this list were presented to me by the vger sysadmin.
Well, you asked for our views; this is how I personally feel about the matter.
The bottom line is that if linux-kernel gets too bad, the real kernel hackers will retreat to private, by-invitation-only lists. This is not hypothetical; while the news gateway was in place, there was a number of converstaions which took place using manually configured e-mail addresses.
Personally, I think this is a bad thing. We don't want to have a Core Team, ala NetBSD. But if people insist on doing things that have the net effect of turning linux-kernel into a sewer, I predict that we will see these elitist Core-Team-like mailing lists form, not because people are being evil, but out of sheer self-defense.
- Ted
| |