On Fri, 22 Aug 1997, Jim Pick wrote:
> I just came back from a week's work, and I've discovered that the nature
> of debian-user has changed dramatically. That's unfortunate, since ...
>
> Now it has been hijacked for use as a batteground for a flame-war.
>
> Bruce, could you please write up something simple - perhaps stating that
> debian-user is a "user support" list only, and that from now on,
> political discussions should go to debian-debate? (or some other list).
This is what debian-talk was supposed to be for -- a place to take noisy
discussions to. Now's a good time to put such a list on the "official"
site. If debian-user is seen as solely a Q&A help forum, and debian-devel
as Q&A + debates on how to extend Debian technically, then debian-talk
could be chartered as "everything that does not belong on the other lists,
such as non-technical discussions regarding Debian, peripheral discussions
that are only incidentally about Debian but mostly about something else,
discussions about the administrative structure of Debian, complaints about
how some developer is doing things, advocacy for & against Debian
vis-a-vis other distributions, etc."
Right now there is no other place for these discussions, so they end up in
the "default" list, debian-user. GNU has gnu.misc.discuss, Linux has
c.o.l.misc and c.o.l.advocacy, why doesn't Debian have the same?
Or else leave debian-user alone and move all Q&A to debian-help with the
charter, "Newbies, here's your place to ask questions! Oldsters,
sysadmins and Debian developers, your questions also belong here." (The
last part is to give an incentive for more experienced people to
subscribe, to increase the quality of the answers.) Debian-devel, of
course, would remain the forum for questions of interest only to
developers: e.g., problems building a new package, which directory a
conffile should go in, etc.
Homage must also be made to Lars W's (I think it was his) suggestion
several months ago for a debian-politics list.
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