Too many mailing lists

Andrey Repin anrdaemon@yandex.ru
Sun Jun 22 01:35:00 GMT 2014


Greetings, Warren Young!

> The Cygwin project has too many mailing lists.  This causes an 
> unjustifiable amount of friction.

Eh? Wait a second, please. Let me pull my fingers up and count.
So far, barring automatic mailing lists like -announce, we have:
1. cygwin (this exact one)
A common mailing list for all things Cygwin. Frankly, very, VERY few things
are off-topic here. With exception of /X stuff, for which there's a clearly
separated, specific list (who you are, if you did not find it from browsing
the website?), about everything cygwin-related goes here.
2. cygwin-xfree (for all things related to the version of X on Cygwin)
As mentioned above, this is the end point for all things/X that is
Cygwin-related. As vast as it can be, not everyone's interested in intricacies
of setting up and using X environment under Cygwin. I, for one, don't.
3. cygwin-talk (a non-technical barely-cygwin related list)
Smokers' room, if you allow me this association.
4. cygwin-apps (a list for PACKAGE MAINTAINERS)
Clearly labelled, this list is for questions about packaging and distribution
of applications under cygwin banner. Nobody have any interested in it, except
active package maintainers.
5. cygwin-patches
This one's going to be missing as soon as the Cygwin repo is migrated to Git,
IMO.
6. cygwin-developers
I think it's clear from the name. The list for developers of Cygwin itself.
7. cygwin-licensing a list for people who need some lawe.
I have no interest in this kind of questions, but I see them popping around
every now and then. I don't understand them, but it seems, they are rather
important for some people.

> Every time someone says "That's not on topic here, go elsewhere," it can
> easily be read as "Go away." 
Every time I remember a reply similar to this, it was not "go elsewhere", but
rather "go to <insert the name of a specific list>". Which looks far from "go
away", to my untrained eye.
(Of course, I'm not including the results from late... erm... "discussion"...
you know, which one I mean... where it was explicitly stated to "go away", and
explained, why.)

> The Cygwin project should only be pushing away toxic people, and multiple
> mailing lists do not have that happy side effect.

I can only see seven lists, of which one is barely cygwin-related, one is
unrelated, and three are developers-only mailing lists.
What's left? Two lists? Hooray, we have ALOT of two mailing lists, where a
question can misdirect!
/shame


--
WBR,
Andrey Repin (anrdaemon@yandex.ru) 22.06.2014, <05:01>

Sorry for my terrible english...


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