[mythtv-users] [OT] Mailing Lists...

J.D. Bakker bakker at thorgal.et.tudelft.nl
Mon Dec 6 12:54:13 UTC 2004


>Why does the Linux community tend to collaborate with e-mail lists?

I have a one-hour commute by train.
I have no Internet access during that time.
I do have a laptop.

A constant for most fora, mailing lists and newsgroups I have 
frequented is that only one out of every 20 messages (if that) is 
interesting. I spend most of my train time filtering the other 19 
out. That's only possible on something local to my laptop, such as a 
mail or newsspool. Most fora I've seen don't make for easy 
wget(1)-targets.

Out of the interesting messages, maybe 1 in 50 is so important that 
it's worth keeping. E-mail and news can just be dumped to a file; 
that's much harder with forum messages. I know, some boards allow 
tagging, but that isn't quite the same as having a local copy. What 
happens when the forum goes away, or when the site admin is a bit too 
overzealous doing a cleanup ?

As an example, I have about 500 saved articles from the linux-kernel 
mailing list, going back to early 1998. I regularly use this as a 
living reference on the kernel, general UNIX programming and coding 
style/tricks. How many fora would you trust to still be around after 
almost seven years ?

Many projects have IRC channels for 'live' interaction. That's not 
quite my bag, but I do have a few IRC logs with (to me) extremely 
useful info.

Others have made points I completely agree with. I am currently 
subscribed to two dozen mailing lists, and it would really hurt my 
productivity if they'd all have (not so) subtly differing user 
interfaces, logins or search functions. E-mail is lightweight, it 
will work in many more circumstances than a web browser will.

Some fora sure are pretty, and I've tried a few of them, but I've yet 
to see one which saves time and effort over a mailing list. And in 
the end, that's all that counts.

JDB.
-- 
LART. 250 MIPS under one Watt. Free hardware design files.
http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/


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