Ross Boylan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote...
> Hi. I'm about to get a new machine and put Debian on it, and was wondering
Congratulations!!
Please don't take the following as criticism, it's meant more as
correcting some mis-knowledge you have. Share And Enjoy, and all
that. Feel free to respond :)
> 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.
Use the debian sources for debian-specific help like "Why doesn't this
.deb install properly?" and the *linux* newsgroups for more general
help.
> My more general question is why this apparent split exists (if I'm correct
> that it does).
So that the Debian-specific questions can be answered in a quieter
forum with less noise. Newsgroups tend to have much more off-topic
junk and spam than mailing lists. Those newsgroups are also for -all-
flavours of Linux, not just Debian. Many of the Debian people who
help here probably don't have the time or inclination to wander
through newsgroups full of questions that have nothing to do with
Debian.
> 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
1. More noise, less 'signal' in the newsgroups.
2. More stuff not related to Debian.
3. News propogation isn't great, people will only get some of the
articles. It depends on -all- of the machines being up and
well-behaved, where mailing lists just depend on debian.org and the
recipient machine.
4. News is slower to propogate.
5. To start up a new newsgroup is a long and involved process, where
if Debian needs a new mailing list they can just start it.
> possible to gateway between a mailing list and a newsgroup, so that posts
> to one come out in both forms.
Gatewaying tends to be buggy and cause dupes. It also means that the
spam and junk that tends to get posted to newsgroups will end up in the
mailing list as well -
> Newsgroups would allow searching and archiving via Deja News (among
> others), would be more visible to others,
The archives are available to anybody on the Debian website. And
there's plenty of advertising that they exist.
> and wouldn't fill up my disk so much :)
:) True. But you -could- always read them from the website
archives!
> 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
Why so? If the discussions weren't available to anybody then
probably it would defeat the purpose of open -support-, but the
mailing lists are open and the archives are on the web ...
> appear somewhat rare, if one judges by traffic in the newsgroups.
Is this a problem? Advertising isn't our game, and Debian has lots
of users. Taking over the world, or even the Linux world, isn't
their aim.
bekj
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