From: Conrad Schneiker <schneiker@...>
Date: 2001-12-09T04:37:27+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:27966] Re: New RubyGarden Poll - this one affectsus all :)

"Dave Thomas" <Dave@PragmaticProgrammer.com> wrote:

> "Conrad Schneiker" <schneiker@jump.net> writes:
>
> > > It is MUCH better to have the article itself be tagged with a unique
> > > ID somehow by the mailing list software.  This way, the message has
> > > the same unique ID no matter what archiving service is archiving the
> > > list.
> >
> > Good points, but I am still not really persuaded, in part due to some
> > further considerations.
>
> I don't understand all this discussion.

Perhaps because you deleted so much of it? :-)

> The Ruby articles already are
> (and as far as I know will continue to be) accessible via blade, or
> indirectly via ruby-talk.org.

Maybe its just me, but I use groups.google because it is usually more
convenient, because it seems to usually respond faster, and because it's
what I use for other newsgroups (i.e. its not Ruby-specific).

> Both take the Ruby article number (like
> 27844) in the URL, so both can be used for external references to
> these articles.

But people typically don't give the URL, just the article number, unlike the
typical groups.google reference. So in my experience, this has been less
convenient. Often, one wants to see an article's thread, and I also
personally somewhat prefer the way threads are handled on groups.google, and
it seems strip out the HTML mail junk that clutters up the Ruby ML archives.

> All it means is that references have to be to the
> mailing-list side of things, not usenet.

Which makes it less convient for routine usenet users and an extra puzzle
for newbies. Given that we expect and exponential influx of people from
other languages and newsgroups, and that lots of these people will be
multi-language users, I have a (strongly moderate :-) preference for
following what *seems* to be a fairly reasonable wider common convention
that a great many such prospects already make use of.

This last part is of course a big unknown, as are the preferences (if any)
of the current NG/ML readers. Which is why I thought a poll might be
interesting.

Conrad

PS: I don't want to seem overly critical of the current system, which I
think is basically OK. However, I think there are some genuine significant
advantages to the other way that these things are handled elsewhere, which I
have grown to appreciate, and which I didn't want to see brushed aside
without a fair hearing.