Re: cygwin and cygwin-xfree lists to merge

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 02:33:21PM -0500, Larry Hall (Cygwin X) wrote:
> Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 04:00:43AM -0600, Gary R. Van Sickle wrote:
>>>> From: Christopher Faylor
>>>>
>>>> The historical reasons for [un?]merging the cygwin and cygwin-xfree
>>>> lists no longer seems to exist so I am contemplating merging the two
>>>> lists.
>>> For us old-timers, what were the historical reasons again, and why/how
>>> did they go away?
>>Good question.  My email records don't go back far enough to know for
>>sure and I don't see anything telling in the mailing list archives.  I
>>think that one of the early maintainers (maybe Suhaib Siddiqi) didn't
>>want to read the cygwin list to look for cygwin-xfree questions.
>
>Yes, I remember that.
>
>>I believe I was actually somewhat reluctant to do the split because (I
>>know this will be hard to believe) I thought there would be end-user
>>confusion that would require a lot of "use the other list" shuttling.
>>
>>OTOH, maybe I was actively insisting on it and relishing the chance to
>>tell people they were off-topic.

>>I'm just proposing this now because Yaakov asked about it and Jon
>>indicated that he would be ok with it.  Yaakov obviously reads both
>>lists and he has observed that the lines are sometimes blurred between
>>what's a X question and what isn't.
>>
>>Another thing that occurred to me is that we could keep the two lists
>>and stop telling people that they *had* to ask questions about X here.
>
>True.  The downside there is there would exist an artificial split
>where some discussion would happen only on Cygwin-X while others would
>happen on the main list.  This would be tough to keep track of and be a
>stumblling block for newbies who might actually look in the archives
>for answers.  If there is a goal to maintain the idea of two lists
>while really having only one, what about having the Cygwin-X list exist
>as a "head" only.  It would be similar to the announce lists in that it
>would forward all email to the main list but would be different in that
>there would be no separate list archive.  I'm not sure how easy it
>would be to set something like this up but it would address the
>concerns some have expressed about filtering out the main Cygwin list
>info.

I could do the cygwin-xfree -> cygwin mirroring fairly easily and even
prepend a "[X11]" to the subject.  Going in the other direction would
require more work.  And, it seems like that would start to make things
more complicated.

We could adopt a convention of prepending [X11] or [Xorg] in front of
X-related messages but I'm sure that people who don't want to see
traffic wouldn't consider that an acceptable alternative to a separate
mailing list.

cgf

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