Good evening, > This is a very active mailing list. This is partly because there is > an astonishingly large number of messages posted to it that are > neither informative, nor entertaining, to, I would estimate, > approximately 99% of its readership.
I personally like how misc@ is the dumping ground, other projects like FreeBSD have sprawling numbers of mailing lists and you are never quite sure which mailing list to send it to, and if you send it to one of the less active ones you are unlikely to get a response, and if you post it to the wrong list, you get told off. At least you know if you post to misc you are almost never offtopic (provided it is not a bug report or patch, and its about OpenBSD :P), and you know that it is going to get delivered to a lot of people, this is a benefit, not a downside. There is nothing worse than trying to track down people in different places, or having to subscribe to tons of different lists to discuss different topics, just to be told to forward it to another list, which therefore those people on that list do not have the history, and need to use the archives. Plaintext emails are rarely more than 1MB in size anyways, its about 1GB worth of emails I get on all the mailing lists, corporate spam, and personal emails combined over the past few years. Also saying it is not informative or entertaining is complete rubbish. I personally enjoy having things delivered to my inbox, potentially finding cool tools people are using to make their life easier, or seeing others encounter issues which I have too. If you do not like the frequency of emails, I recommend you make a dedicated mailing list mailbox, or even a separate mailbox per list, or simply to unsubscribe. > The most recent example of this phenomenon is that someone posted a > short message expressing the opinion that the default name "the devil > himself" for the "daemon" user ought to be changed. The resulted in > about 10 replies. I estimate that one, or maybe two, of those replies > contained useful information. The others were posted by people > thinking that they are clever, who are not, insulting the original > poster to a greater or lesser extent, and offering nothing useful. > One of those people stated with confidence that the original poster > had objected to something that he considered to be "politically > incorrect". Think of how many more emails you are going to cause by complaining, then realise sometimes its best to let the spam or useless emails fizzle out from the lack of attention to it. People will naturally reply to what they are interested in, if there is replies it is because people spent the time responding, and people don't waste their time for no reason. > First of all, there is nothing "politically correct" about objecting > to the name "the devil himself" for the "daemon" user. The name is > dumb. Putting it into an operating system is something that people do > who are in their twenties, and high on weed (both conditions are > necessary). Grown-ups would say "the user ID of daemon programs like > cron" or words to that effect. Daemons are not demons, which Dennis > Ritchie (or maybe it was Ken Thompson. but I think it was Dennis > Ritchie) knew, which is why he called them daemons. Daemons are not > malevolent spirits. They are more like nature-spirits, neither > malevolent nor benevolent. Conflating them with demons is just dumb. For someone objecting to the thread, you seem to be rather interested in it. > Second of all, and more to the point, publicly insulting people who > post to this mailing list is not a productive use of your time This is a benefit rather than a downside. I will admit at times I have been scared to post to the OpenBSD mailing list as you expect to be shat on for it. What you come to realise though is OpenBSD's complete rejection of the idea of a Code of Conduct is not a downside but a blessing. People tell you exactly what they think of you, they do not sugar coat it, they do not catch you up in a situation where if you defend yourself you could be punished for violating the CoC. The joys of open solutions is that you can easy write a filter to redirect all emails to your trash for people who are toxic, or better yet if you run your own mail server, you can bounce their email with a passive aggressive comment. The options are endless! > even more to the point -- reading postings to this mailing list that > publicly insult people who have made other postings to this mailing > list, and that say nothing else, is not a productive use of my time. You phrase this like you have been coerced into it, so for the avoidance of doubt, nobody here is pointing a gun at your head and demanding you read emails from the mailing list you are not interested in, nothing stops you marking them as read or deleting them. > Please remember that other people do not think that you are as clever > as you think you are -- and this is true of everyone, even if you are > Einstein or Goethe -- and even if you are as clever as you think you > are, no one cares. Please do not post articles to this mailing list > that are neither informative, nor entertaining, nor helpful in any > other way, to 99% of the people who read it. Please remember that people are free to ask whatever they wish and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop them. So either unsubscribe, move the subscription to another mailbox, or quit complaining about people discussing topics *YOU* have no interest in. Take care, -- Polarian Jabber/XMPP: [email protected]
