[MacPerl] Re: Whence MacPerl

[Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>]

<x-flowed>Those who don't want to read the philosophical statements can just 
read the first few paragraphs of information here :-)

At 23:44 -0500 2/3/99, Paul J. Schinder wrote:
> So have the appropriate amounts of fun with the new lists when you get
> them going.

The new lists (all of them) will be up very soon.  This weekend, I 
expect. With digests.  At their new home on macperl.org :-)  They 
will all be majordomo lists (like the current MacPerl list) so 
transferring people should be fairly straightforward.

Given my statements above, you can probably guess that I will 
subscribe to all of them. How often you'll see me there depends on 
what's happening.  Whether or not the new lists have a lot of traffic 
is up to youall; they don't cost much to maintain in any event. If we 
need new ones, we'll create them. If we've misjudged the demand for 
one or more, we'll remove it.

Look for an announcement by Monday.

=====
Now, a little off-topic, a little opinion ;-)

At 23:44 -0500 2/3/99, Paul J. Schinder wrote:
> Really?  Name one.

Name a "big name in Perldom" :-)  Name two or three :*)
But it wouldn't be proper to do so in public and that's not why we're here...

However, I agree with robinmcf@altern.org (who, by the way, did not 
say anything about people who "offend the easily offended" only about 
"large egos.)  There are a _lot_ of large egos in Perl land, 
especially Unix perl land.  Anyone who doesn't think so is invited to 
join perl-5-porters for a few weeks...

By the way, if anyone is interested, I have recently discovered that 
compl.lang.perl.moderated is available in mailing list form. (For 
everyone who thinks I am foolishly out of touch to not read Usenet... 
I no longer have to care :-)  To subscribe, send email to
   majordomo@eyrie.org
with the body of the message
   subscribe clpm
Or try:
mailto:clpm-request@eyrie.org?Subject=subscribe?Body=subscribe%0Dend

Unfortunately, I cannot promise you that clpm will be as polite, 
tolerant, or like-minded as the MacPerl list. YMMV. Caveat lurker.

=======
And now a lot of opinion (see, I make it easy for people to stop 
reading where their interest wanes... ;-)


> Well, duh, maybe because it's the MacPerl mailing list?  Because the
> charter limits it to discussions about MacPerl?

We don't actually have a charter.  We have a few comments on a web 
page. From the info message that comes back from the list, one could 
believe the charter is to "have fun using MacPerl". Oftimes we do. 
Mayhap the new lists will have more expressive charters available. Be 
that as it may...

> of off topic postings here, and even participate in some, but asking
> about fork() here is clearly over the line.

Probably it is. I with-hold judgement until someone actually asks 
about fork(:-).  Because... Contrary to popular legend, no one has 
asked about fork() on this list in recent history.   A lot of people 
have begun to _believe_ that someone was trying to ask about 
fork()... but... it... never... happened.  It's all in your minds!

(He said he'd tried fork()... he mentioned it in passing. He 
mentioned several things.  fork() was never the central point of his 
posting.  Really).

> there's evidence that people get driven away by off topic postings.

There is evidence that people unsubscribe. There is a circumstantial 
correlation that some number of them leave after a set of off-topic 
postings.

Some people will leave because they no longer use a Mac, or don't 
have time for Perl, or... In short, we don't _know_ why anyone 
leaves; we only surmise.
Personally, I think more people are driven away by the lack of a 
digest version. Any long thread that one is not interested in (e.g. I 
could not care much less about the Cpan.pm discussions ;-) can be 
tedious to wade through in a message by message list.

However; a modern email client (Eudora, Emailer, Mailsmith, Mh, 
Xmh...), possibly combined with something like procmail (Unix side) 
can work wonders; I subscribe to 43 (yup) separate mailing lists at 
current count (and no, I don't read them all every day). Most are in 
digest form. All are filtered, stored, and ready for me if and when I 
want them. There is _no legitimate reason_ for "I didn't like that 
particular thread so I unsubscribed". That's only an excuse.

If you aren't interested in a thread then mark it as read and go on 
with your life.

- Vicki
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</x-flowed>