Hello Anton, On 25-Feb-2009 Anton van Straaten wrote: > Aaron W. Hsu wrote: >> 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. 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.
Of course, I can understand the desire to split up the individual processes such as SRFIs and the R6RS standardization process. However, once the process is done, I think that it would be important to keep as much of the discussion of Scheme together. After R6RS's standardization, it makes sense to me to start talking about it on C.L.S. Likewise for the SRFIs. > 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 think having an alternative is just going to further segregate our discussions. Rather, I think someone (I don't have the time or technical inclination to do this) who cares about such things should set up a news to mail gateway so that people who want a mailing list can get it, and people who want the newsgroup can get it. It is also possible to set up a web forum for such discussions as well. To me, it is most important that we ensure each of the media we use goes to everyone else, so that the discussions can be truly broad and so that we are not cutting people off across distribution methods. We already have a newsgroup interface to the general forum for Scheme, so the solution is to make gateways that make the content available to others as well. > 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. For process discussions, I agree that managed discussions are nice, but if we are trying to encourage open participation, we shouldn't be managing things so much. Let C.L.S serve as the forum, and link into it with mailing lists and web forums, so that everyone has the option to use the tools that they like, without harming the overal unity of the discussion. Another thing here, that I think is important, is that we encourage implementation discussions on general forums. I see all the time someone discussing something on a general forum, only to be redirected to the implementation specific forum for their solution. This only encourages people to isolate themselves according to implementatoin, which isn't what we want. Processes that are formal make sense to separate, but the intersection of "formal processes" and "Implementation specifics" is so great as to almost eliminate most other discussions. That is, if we can't discuss the standard, and we can't discuss the implementation specifics (which people seem to try hard to redirect), then what can we discuss? The only thing left is vain philosophizing about general theories. That's only tasteful for so long before people start to want other meat. That's why I prefer to have and keep an unregulated general discussion forum that is available in all forms equally well. Gmane works for mailing lists to a degree, but it doesn't share with other news servers, so it's necessarily inhibiting the newsgroup interface audience, simply because they won't share. I understand that there are social issues to this, but I think these could be overcome for something like Comp.lang.scheme, which is a newsgroup, rather than a mailing list. -- Aaron W. Hsu <[email protected]> | <http://www.sacrideo.us> "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." -- Frederic Bastiat +++++++++++++++ ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) ++++++++++++++ _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
