I hope this to be my last contribution to this thread, so I'll try to make it thorough. Sorry about the length.
I will use "must" to indicate that unless we do it that
way, there is going to be problems and the Debian project
will suffer. (No film at 11.) I'm willing to stake whatever
reputation I have on the Internet on this. These opinions aren't
mere whims. I base them on a few thousand hours spent using a
news reader in the past seven years.
* debian-user@lists.debian.org must not be replaced with a news group
News articles move much slower than e-mail messages. This
is because news is not a critical resource to most people,
so admins don't want to spend lots of money to make it
move fast. Part of the problem is that the volume of news
is huge (our university news server sometimes got more than
two gigabytes per day, until they cut binaries groups).
Therefore debian-user must stay.
* debian-user@lists.debian.org must not be linked with comp.os.linux.debian
(or other comp.* group)
It is easy to post (or cross-post) messages to newsgroups
you don't read. It happens all the time. Some people do it
to start flame wars (trolling).
It is also easy to start reading a newsgroup. Many more
people read a newsgroup than an average mailing list. If
there is a flame war, there will be many participants
and it will go on and on and on. It is almost impossible
to kill a flame war on a newsgroup. Because news moves
slowly, if people in one part of the world cease fire,
a couple of days later some other people somewhere else
will get the first articles and be angry and start it all
over again. Cross-posts make flame wars worse.
Flame wars on mailing lists are easy to control.
Subscribing to a list takes much more effort, which
reduces the number of participants. People who won't
stop can be thrown out of the list.
If debian-user and col.debian are linked (with messages in
one appearing in the other), the usefulness of the list will
vanish. We will see flame war after flame war (not to mention
spam after spam -- the spam can't be cancelled from the
mailing list).
The existing linux.debian.user group is OK (see below), but
a mainstream group is not.
* linux.* must not be moved to comp.os.linux.*
Same reasons apply as to mailing lists. linux.* aren't on
everyone's news server, so fewer people can easily access
them, but anyway who wants to can.
* comp.os.linux.debian (and col.red-hat and col.slackware) can be
created if they are independent of the respective mailing lists
Personally, I don't think distribution-specific news
groups will do much good, but I don't mind if they
are created. If it comes to voting, I will vote against
them, but I expect to be out-voted.
If you want the mainstream groups, read and follow the
instructions in news.announce.newgroups. Don't expect
anyone else to do it. (This is the standard answer
to almost all proposals for new groups. It tends to
silence almost all people. :)
* If you think reading news is easier than reading mail, get
better software.
There's no inherent reason why news readers should be
better at grouping related messages together than mail
readers. If your mail reader isn't capable of doing it,
get a better one. Or start reading thew linux.* groups.
If your ISP (or company, or whatever) doesn't have any
better programs installed, well, that's unfortunate.
I know one person who still reads all his mail with
/bin/mail and who refuses to learn procmail. He
doesn't have a right to demand list-specific keywords
in subjects so that he can tell different lists apart
from the subject alone. Mail filters exist because they
are necessary. If you can't use them, you lose.
--
Please read <http://www.iki.fi/liw/mail-to-lasu.html> before mailing me.
Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.
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