Aaron W. Hsu wrote: > On 25-Feb-2009 Grant Rettke wrote: >> On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 11:10 PM, Anton van Straaten >> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On the technical side, this mailing list has been quite useful during >>> this election, and during the development of R6RS, but for ongoing >>> dialog on multiple subjects, something more partitioned might be >>> useful, to make it easier for people to tune out discussion they're >>> not interested in. _How about a web-based forum with a gateway to >>> mailing lists, for example? _Is that overkill, or something that >>> enough people would appreciate to make it worthwhile? >> That sounds like a good idea. What would you call the mailing list >> where people can talk about their rationale for wanting to be able to >> say: > > I never understood the reason for dividing up discussion into > partitions. I would prefer to have more resources on one channel working > together. It is perfectly possible to ignore discussions that are no > longer interesting to a person.
True, but everyone seems to have different preferences about these things. Getting some feedback on this is what I was after with my question. > To that end, what's wrong with comp.lang.scheme? I like usenet for my > discussions, and this list is annoying in that sense. There are disadvantages on multiple fronts to using c.l.scheme for something like the R6RS process. First, since the process was intended to be a formal one, there's some benefit to clearly distinguishing between discussion that associated with that process, and other kinds of discussion. Despite the various ways one might go about ignoring discussions, there are good reasons why someone might not want to have to filter out e.g. questions from newbies and sundry Eternal Septembering to get to discussion about ongoing and future development of Scheme itself. Besides, I suspect there would have been complaints from people not interested in R6RS if c.l.scheme had been used for all of the R6RS discussion. Similarly, would you really want the traffic from every SRFI to appear on c.l.scheme? At the very least, you'd need disciplined thread marking to be able to filter it effectively. But again, this is partly why I asked the question. c.l.scheme represents a small fraction of all the discussion that goes on in the wider Scheme community, much of which is divided by implementation, or else on individual blogs and other mailing lists. It's possible that not having a common, generally accepted, non-implementation-specific alternative to c.l.scheme is inhibiting more general discussion, which could even be increasing the implementation balkanization effect. I was hoping to get a sense of attitudes in this area. If "everyone" thinks c.l.scheme is fine, then presumably some effort towards making better use of it might be all that's needed. But I have a feeling that many people actually prefer alternatives to Usenet, and are essentially voting about that by just not using c.l.scheme. To extend the suggestion I made in my earlier comment, the desire for a Usenet interface could be addressed by gatewaying to a newsgroup, similar to what Gmane does. The SRFI lists are available via Gmane, for example. Something more centralized and more under the control of the Scheme community could make managing these discussions easier. Anton _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
