Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 17:44:52 -0800 From: brian@worldcontrol.com To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Does FreeBSD need a -notreallyrelatedtoFreeBSDbut mailing list? Message-ID: <19990119174452.A89975@top.worldcontrol.com>
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I've been using FreeBSD extensively for a number of years. I've written several device drives for it and tracked -current, -questions, -multimedia, and -cvs-all. However, even now I still occasionally get chided for posting what people consider inappropriate or wrong mailing list questions. There is a class of questions that I'm not sure any of the FreeBSD mailing lists are chartered to answer. And from reading the lists I do, it seems that others feel similarly. The class of questions are those which at first glance don't have anything in particular to do with FreeBSD, but in an important way do. There are those who are trying to use FreeBSD in real world applications and trying to displace the rather poor operating system offered by another company. In my efforts to do this, I have to provide a complete solution which includes everything the customer is used to being able to do. Occasionally, I run into a situation where the customer says I want to be able to do X, or that X is to be included among the things the system must be able to do when replacing the other system. Sometimes X seems wholly unrelated to FreeBSD. To make the discussion more concrete an example is that of a customer who was used to printing his business cards on the Avery tearable business card stock. They had used PrintShop to create the card. I found an adequate app to manage the card data, however, I did not initially see a solution to printing to the Avery card stock. I thought about posting to -questions, but the question seemed just too removed from FreeBSD and likely to generate much response email indicating so. I eventually solved the problem through other channels, however, I suspect there were many FreeBSD users who would have had the answer handy had I asked. There have been plenty of other such questions, and I occasionally see them on -questions couched in "this isn't really related to FreeBSD but..." language. I suspect that as FreeBSD is used in an increasing number of environments that others will and have run into similar questions. I'd like to suggest that either the charter of -questions be amended to include such questions, or perhaps the creation of a mailing list -notreallyrelatedtoFreeBSDbut (-solutions ?) to address such questions. It may be that many consider -questions an appropriate forum for these kinds of questions, however, there are those who do not, and clarification will at least help me. -- Brian Litzinger <brian@litzinger.com> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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