On 3/12/06, Steve Lamb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This has been asked for and rejected for the past several years. On > many things Debian is sensible. On this Debian is downright negligent > and utterly stupid. Want to know the reason why it isn't implemented?
Because not every user who has a question wants to agree to receive hundreds of email messages a day as the price. Because a community that accepts non-subscribed mail to its lists is "friendlier" than one that doesn't. Because subscribing to the list *is* a barrier, and *will* prevent a good number of people from asking their questions. If you've ever used ns2, you know what a beast it can be, especially if you want to do something that wasn't quite envisioned by the authors. Their mailing list is closed to non-subscribers, and gets heavy traffic. Most of this traffic is completely irrelevant to me, dealing with minutiae of implementation. Since that's the only method for providing feedback or asking questions, I can't provide feedback or ask questions, since the price is higher than what I'm willing to pay. Mozilla goes one better. If you want to provide feedback or a bug report, you have to create an actual account with Yet Another Password to remember. To me, that's a clear statement that they don't want user feedback. The same applies to any project using Bugzilla. Open posting is *good*. Yes, I get spam because of it, but most of that is caught by Gmail's spam filter. Some days I don't get a single false negative, and most days I only get one or two. Most of the spam I get because of this list isn't even sent through the list. It's sent to my actual email address, since the list archives make an excellent target for harvesters. Adding a subscribers-only rule for sending mail to the list wouldn't help this at all. -- Michael A. Marsh http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
