Re: A cygwin mailing list experiment

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Tue, May 08, 2001 at 10:04:44PM +1000, Robert Collins wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Christopher Faylor" <cgf@redhat.com>
>To: <cygwin-developers@cygwin.com>
>Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2001 11:07 AM
>Subject: OT: A cygwin mailing list experiment
>
>
>>Corinna and I have decided to be conspicuously absent from the cygwin
>>mailing list for this week (at least).  I'd like to see what this does
>>to the traffic there.
>>
>>Btw, the reason for doing this is that cygwin and cygwin-xfree are
>>pretty much swamping the sources.redhat.com server.  I've tried a
>couple
>>of times to compose mail asking for suggestions for reducing the
>>traffic.  But, I couldn't bring myself to send it because I knew that
>>it would either be ignored, or it would result in a flurry of clueless
>>responses (not too cynical, am I?), which would aggravate the problem.
>
>This may not fit politically or pragmatically, but have you considered
>utilising something like sourceforge, whose business model is centred
>around providing mailing lists/bug trackers and the like?

The political part is the problem.  I also like being able to do sysadmin
work on sources.redhat.com.

I have to admit to being constantly frustrated by our sysadmin's
assurance that sources.redhat.com will be moved to a new, improved site
with infinitely better bandwidth, though.  It was supposed to happen in
January.

It looks like I have things tuned well enough to accomodate the recent
increases in activity.  I do think that there are procedural ways to
deal with the problems in the list, though.

Improving cygwin's documentation and making it available as a man or
info page is one way.

Weekly FAQ submissions is another.

Standardized FAQ-like responses to repeated queries (e.g., "Why doesn't
chmod work") is another.

I'm thinking of doing what some mailing lists do and sending email
to first-time posters, pointing out locations for various resources
on the web.

I'm still interested in seeing what becomes of our experiment, though.

I am usually the person with the first or second highest response to
mailing list traffic.  It is hard for me not to respond to problems but,
so far, my input has barely been needed.  Sniff.

cgf