Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 14:59:38 -0800 (PST) From: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu> To: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> Cc: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: -question on -doc Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9812171437250.5681-100000@s8-37-26.student.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <19981218075659.20332@welearn.com.au>
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On Fri, 18 Dec 1998, Sue Blake wrote: >That might not help much. I have always found the description of >freebsd-questions a real turn-off. In fact, when I was a clueless >newbie this haiku in negative terms made me avoid using >freebsd-questions. Now that I'm just a newbie it makes me shrug. > >We've been here before. Apparently the description makes perfect sense >to everyone else so I'm just a mutant. Fine. I've got emails here from >several other mutants who insist they understood the description to >mean keep out. This flag's pretty tattered now. I give up. Almost. Sue, I see your point clearly. ref: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/handbook355.html#708 This is the mailing list for questions about FreeBSD. You should not send "how to" questions to the technical lists unless you consider the question to be pretty technical. The second thing it says it "you should not how to questions". Hey, these things aren't written in stone. Let me reword it. This is the mailing list for questions about FreeBSD. You should send your "how to" questions to the freebsd-questions list. Unless you are a FreeBSD developer this is probably the place for you to ask your question. Furthermore, many lists say... This is a technical mailing list for which strictly technical content is expected. It does seem that the list charters have a very "stay the hell out of here, here, there and here" attitude to them. It is my guess that they were made that way because someone wanted it to be very clear that you should not be sending things to -hackers, -core, or -security to protect the S/N ratio. What are we trying to accomplish? Are we trying to make absolutuley certain that people don't write to the "sacred" technical lists? Or are we trying to make it clear where is the proper place to write? Let's make it clear where the proper place to write is. If we want to keep technical lists seperate then lets physically seperate them on the html document. There is no sense in forcing a general purpose user to pour through all of the lists summaries. General Purpose Lists - These lists are the most commonly used lists by most common people. You will probably find the list you need listed here. -questions -chat Technical Lists - Unless you are a developer you will probably not need to write to the following lists. -hackers -current Don't just look at this document as a list of paragraphs. Look at it as a whole document. These are my recommendations. Move general purpose lists to the top in a seperate section. This way the general purpose reader hist these first. Move the technical list to the bottom in a seperate section. Delete the subheader "Individual list charters". Do the stuff outlined in the original email that I sent. I don't know jack about SGML. I wish I did. If I post an HTML doc on my website can -docs retromarkup to SGML? I will write in HTML if it can help you guys at all. Catchya Later, | UW Mechanical Engineering Jason Wells | http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jcwells/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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