On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 02:33:21PM -0500, Larry Hall (Cygwin X) wrote: > Christopher Faylor wrote: >> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 04:00:43AM -0600, Gary R. Van Sickle wrote: >>>> From: Christopher Faylor >>>> >>>> The historical reasons for [un?]merging the cygwin and cygwin-xfree >>>> lists no longer seems to exist so I am contemplating merging the two >>>> lists. >>> For us old-timers, what were the historical reasons again, and why/how >>> did they go away? >>Good question. My email records don't go back far enough to know for >>sure and I don't see anything telling in the mailing list archives. I >>think that one of the early maintainers (maybe Suhaib Siddiqi) didn't >>want to read the cygwin list to look for cygwin-xfree questions. > >Yes, I remember that. > >>I believe I was actually somewhat reluctant to do the split because (I >>know this will be hard to believe) I thought there would be end-user >>confusion that would require a lot of "use the other list" shuttling. >> >>OTOH, maybe I was actively insisting on it and relishing the chance to >>tell people they were off-topic.
>>I'm just proposing this now because Yaakov asked about it and Jon >>indicated that he would be ok with it. Yaakov obviously reads both >>lists and he has observed that the lines are sometimes blurred between >>what's a X question and what isn't. >> >>Another thing that occurred to me is that we could keep the two lists >>and stop telling people that they *had* to ask questions about X here. > >True. The downside there is there would exist an artificial split >where some discussion would happen only on Cygwin-X while others would >happen on the main list. This would be tough to keep track of and be a >stumblling block for newbies who might actually look in the archives >for answers. If there is a goal to maintain the idea of two lists >while really having only one, what about having the Cygwin-X list exist >as a "head" only. It would be similar to the announce lists in that it >would forward all email to the main list but would be different in that >there would be no separate list archive. I'm not sure how easy it >would be to set something like this up but it would address the >concerns some have expressed about filtering out the main Cygwin list >info. I could do the cygwin-xfree -> cygwin mirroring fairly easily and even prepend a "[X11]" to the subject. Going in the other direction would require more work. And, it seems like that would start to make things more complicated. We could adopt a convention of prepending [X11] or [Xorg] in front of X-related messages but I'm sure that people who don't want to see traffic wouldn't consider that an acceptable alternative to a separate mailing list. cgf -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/
