Hi. I'm about to get a new machine and put Debian on it, and was wondering if someone could explain the relation between the Debian mailing lists and the comp.os.linux hierarchy in newgroups.
My immediate practical question is which source I should use for help. My more general question is why this apparent split exists (if I'm correct that it does). First, why not use the newsgroups mechanism? Are there people without access to them, or is it just an historical holdover? I believe it is possible to gateway between a mailing list and a newsgroup, so that posts to one come out in both forms. Newsgroups would allow searching and archiving via Deja News (among others), would be more visible to others, and wouldn't fill up my disk so much :) Of course, Debian could use newgroups but keep them separate from the comp.os.linux groups. Is there any reason to do so? It seems to me doing so somewhat defeats the purpose of open software. It also makes Debian appear somewhat rare, if one judges by traffic in the newsgroups. If this has been discussed ad nauseum before, I'd appreciate a pointer to the earlier discussions. I hunted around the archives some and couldn't turn up anything.
