Re: Re: Moving cygwin discussions to Usenet? (e.g., alt.os.cygwin)

[Eduardo Chappa <chappa at math dot washington dot edu>]

*** Philippe Bastiani (philippe.bastiani@wanadoo.fr) wrote today:

:) > Either actually read the mailing list via email as intended or read
:) > it via news.
:)
:) We can read/write messages via news.gmane.org server...
:)
:) But, IMHO, a group of discussion would be very useful: for the
:) beginners, for 'repeat' questions and problems, ..., for any debat
:) concerning Cygwin!

I agree with a proposal of this type, which should be completely separate
from this list, and where people can discuss anything related to cygwin
(even ask stupid questions, in whatever sense a question may be stupid).

I see why someone would like to keep all the mail related to cygwin in one
list, but I also see why some people would like to reduce the number of
messages getting to them (yes I know about gmane.org, but gmane.org is not
USENET, just one server, which has been slow for me sometimes)

Finally, one of the advantages about a separate newsgroup is that people
would feel more confortable asking a question. The cygwin mailing list
tries very hard to have people not to ask questions (search the FAQs
first, look for a better mailing list, etc). Even though I agree with this
type of policy from an administrative point of view, I consider it to be a
bad policy for cygwin users (the ones that run the stuff that some of you
create), since real people are having a need for an answer and maybe
directing a question like that towards the newsgroup would take some of
the pressure off in sending the question to the list and getting a mean
answer back (I got one for my first question, even though I did look at
the archives and couldn't find anything).

 My experience supporting Pine has shown me that most people (not the very
technical ones), when they find a problem *in* package "X", will go to the
mailing list about "X" to have their question answered. For example, "I
can't send e-mail with Pine, why?", is a problem with the SMTP
server/sendmail/whatever, not with Pine but most people get that problem
when using a mail client, so they think that the problem is with the
client. In an analogous way, people see problems in cygwin and they go to
the cygwin mailing list to have their question answered. Part of the
solution of the problem is learning to diagnose the problem, and everyone
needs to learn to do that. Maybe one way to get this type of questions out
of here is by creating a newsgroup, but just to say the whole thruth, even
with a newsgroup to handle this type of questions, some of them will still
pop up here (for example, one could add to the policy for the mailing
list:  "if you are not 99% sure that your question/problem is related to
cygwin, simply post it to the newsgroup").

For these reasons, I completely support the idea of creating an
independent newsgroup.

-- 
Eduardo
http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/

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