Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 00:33:42 -0700 From: "Cliff L. Biffle" <cbiffle@safety.net> To: "Lucky Green" <shamrock@cypherpunks.to> Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 5.0 newbies: FreeBSD's future [was: Re: Tracking -CURRENT] Message-ID: <200305010033.42160.cbiffle@safety.net> In-Reply-To: <007401c30f75$5e4227d0$6601a8c0@VAIO650> References: <007401c30f75$5e4227d0$6601a8c0@VAIO650>
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Well said. Speaking as someone who -is- subscribed to both current@ and cvs-all@, I got something on the order of three hundred new messages from the two lists today. Expecting a user of 5.0-RELEASE who is tracking head for the bugfixes to read -- or even skim -- all these is, well, a tall order. However, I also recognize that a lot of developers aren't interested in answering questions, particularly ones that, to someone immersed in the code, seem dumb. Perhaps a new mailing list is in order? I'm generally not a proponent of fragmenting mailing lists, since more often than not the people with questions are on one, while the people with answers are on another. However, what do y'all think about a current-questions sort of list? current@ tends to be more devel-oriented, and questions@ tends to be clueless about -current or even 5.0. I know I would have benefited from it greatly early on (and probably still would). As far as searching the mailing list archives, that's all well and good -- as long as you know what to search for, which a lot of people don't. "My computer won't leave the bootloader" doesn't translate for most people into a search query of "disabling ACPI." :-) (For relatively recent converts, it doesn't even translate to "my computer won't leave the bootloader," for that matter.) The fact of the matter is that humans are vastly better natural-language search engines than what we have on the mailing list manager, assuming they're in a position to answer questions (are willing and have the time). A separate questions list might resolve this...maybe. Thoughts? -Cliff L. Biffle
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