Re: [MacPerl] MPPE Mailing list

[Richard Gordon <maccgi@bellsouth.net>]

At 07:19 -0400 7/13/1999, Chris Nandor wrote:
>So you are arguing that all traffic for every topic on the Internet should
>go to one mailing list?  That is, is it a burden for users to have alt.sex
>and comp.lang.perl.misc as to separate groups?  :)

I thought they were the same thing. :-]

I don't think that newsgroup divisions necessarily serve as a model 
for mailing lists in any case. As far as division of discussions is 
concerned, that's what subject headers are for. This is the only 
mailing list I've ever subscribed to that is so finely subdivided. 
While all of them require that posts involve something that at least 
vaguely touches on the mother subject, nobody on the AppleScript list 
is going to get bent out of shape if somebody brings up MacPerl or 
JavaScript even if the relevancy is pretty strained. Given Perl's 
x-platform nature and that it is not an end in itself, just a tool to 
do things with, it seems natural to me that MaPerl users would have 
an interest in a variety of topics that were only tangentially 
related to MacPerl as such.

> >3. There isn't enough collective list traffic to require separate lists.
>
>Some people believe there is.

As I recall, the move to sub-lists occurred after there were 
something like 900-1000 messages posted during December (?) because a 
lot of them had little to do with MacPerl. In any case, I've got 
about 2700 messages from all of the lists since the first of the year 
and that works out to less than 450 per month. Based on that dropoff, 
it appears that the discussions did not move to the sublists, they 
just stopped and I don't think that was the intention.

>
> >4. Especially since BBEdit enhanced its MacPerl integration, there is
> >5. A swing by
> >6. If you accept the proposition that while Perl can do a lot of
> >7. Aside from being able to investigate mac-centric issues, the main
>
>I am not sure how any of these argues for a single MacPerl list.

Again, I don't consider MacPerl an end in itself or even something 
that lends itself to containerized discussion. I think that cgi is 
what is driving the adoption of Perl outside of unix (which is 
probably the main reason why Chairman Bill would love to hijack 
Perl), tho there are plenty of other potential uses for it. If that 
belief is warranted, then it strikes me as counterproductive to 
formally restrict discussions of cgi (even if the ultimate server 
will not be running MacPerl).

>
>Anyway, according to Matthias, people _were_ leaving because of the CGI and
>Web and non-Perl and non-MacPerl talk on the list.  I hope that separating
>the lists has lessened the unsubscriptions.

I don't know about subscriptions or why people left when they left, 
but it looks like message traffic has tailed off as I mentioned. 
There are plenty of things that come up on other lists that I have no 
interest in reading about, but I just skip the messages based on the 
subject header. Vicki has indicated that there are a large number of 
people who subscribe to a sublist, but not to the main list and this 
suggests to me that a lot of MacPerl users aren't interested in core 
MacPerl. If nothing else, I don't see where toolbox, porters, modules 
and MPPE need to be split off of the main list since they are 
MacPerl-centric by definition. By the same token, why not consolidate 
AnyPerl, cgi and the Forum (which I wasn't even aware of) into a 
single miscellaneous-other list?


Richard Gordon
--------------------
Gordon Consulting & Design
Database Design/Scripting Languages
mailto:richard@richardgordon.net
http://www.richardgordon.net
770.971.6887 (voice)
770.216.1829 (fax)

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