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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