lkml.org 
[lkml]   [1998]   [Jan]   [23]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: 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

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:41    [W:0.063 / U:1.056 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site