Re: [[email protected]: Glad I am not on bootstrap]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2000 at 11:50:24AM +0900, Simon Cozens wrote:
> My one suggestion for them though.  Have one list.  But have that list 
> require that titles have keywords for which sub-list it would be on.  Any 
> email to the list with a title that did not fit the format would be 
> rejected.
> 
> Then anyone with a mail-filter can get the effect of multiple lists.  But 
> anyone who wants (like Simon and Russ) could see the whole list in all its 
> gory detail.


Problem.  You have to be a procmail wizard to get anything done.
Maybe I'm a Luditte, but I've never learned mail filtering, and having
this knowledge as a prerequisite for contributing to Perl might be a
silly barrier to others as well.  bootstrap has almost totally swamped
my meager mail capabilities.

Alternative.  Have one big list made up of smaller lists.  In essense,
multiple views of the same data.  For example.  I subscribe to
[email protected].  All posts to that list go to p6p (our big mailing
list) as well as perl6-qa.  All replies to that post on p6p are
mirrored on perl6-qa.  There are many ways to implement this which are
largely irrelevant the moent.

This allows people to choose if they want to drink from the fire hose
or sip.  There is still one big mailing list encompasing all of perl6
development, but it can be viewed as smaller streams.  In essense, the
mail filtering proposed above will be built in.

The only problem I see here is the sublists will not be free of random
chatter from the main lists.  One of the nice features of having
independent sub lists (such as perl-qa is now) is we know the people
involved int he discussions are at least focused enough to subscribe
to a specific list about it.  This avoids the problem of every Joe
Random putting their $0.02 into every conversation and bogging things
down.  However, this also limits what help the generalists can give.
I dunno which way it falls.


On the whole, something like this auto-filtering solution would make
me happy.


-- 

Michael G Schwern      http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/      [email protected]
Just Another Stupid Consultant                      Perl6 Kwalitee Ashuranse
Sometimes these hairstyles are exaggerated beyond the laws of physics
          - Unknown narrator speaking about Anime