Fellow PLUGgers, I have an open question about the general policy (?) on the topics of messages on our already congested mailing lists (this as well as the newbie list) that I hope to raise. There have been a number of posts on the lists lately, that have been giving me the feeling that we've become a seeming counterpart of the "Anything Goes" fora we used to have during the BBSing days. I do not think this is the correct way to go, and think that both PLUG lists should be limited to Linux-related discussions as well as PLUG events coordination.
In particular the thread that I am forking off from started with a question about a particular HTML form that was meant to interact with a PostgreSQL database through PHP4. While indeed in this case the Apache, PHP4 and PostgreSQL installations were on a GNU/Linux system (and the hostname in question even had 'linux' in it), I do not think it was "Linux-centric". To provide an illustration, compare this with Dr. Manalastas's posts about his building xine on his GNU/Linux box, getting help with resolving particular library issues in his installation. Or with GNU/Linux security discussions, or installation woes, or kernel debugging. We have had for a decent while now two particular mailing lists on lists.free.net.ph that I believe have been made public enough for people to have at least heard about. I refer to the OSS-Dev and PHP mailing lists. The OSS-Dev mailing list was set up to cater to discussions to help people who are developing software using available free and open source development tools. The PHP mailing list was set up to cater to PHP-centric development discussion. The rationale behind these lists is that while indeed Apache, PHP4 and PostgreSQL run on GNU/Linux systems, they are in no way limited to GNU/Linux, or UNIX for that matter, and discussions about developing using them will actually have very little to do (most of the time) with the underlying platform. And even in the situations when they are platform-specific, I am of the belief that this niche is not too specialized to not warrant a list of its own. While I see nothing wrong per se with us having "non-Linux-centric" discussions on the PLUG mailing lists, I know for a fact that a lot of people find the traffic a whee bit too high (and perhaps a bit irrelevant, at times). So I'd like to know what the community's thoughts are on what we should consider "on-topic", and which posts we should gently (?) ween over to other lists that I have volunteered to host on lists.free.net.ph. Cheers. --> Jijo -- Federico Sevilla III : <http://jijo.free.net.ph/> Network Administrator : The Leather Collection, Inc. GnuPG Key ID : 0x93B746BE
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