From: Sean Chittenden <sean@...>
Date: 2002-10-01T11:50:42+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby-talk separation, part II

> > > >ZenTest and ZenWeb were just released. I announced these to
> > > >several lists including this one. I'm sure many of you got
> > > >multiple copies. I admit that is annoying. These releases
> > > >announce my LAST announcements to ruby-talk@. I'll be
> > > >announcing only to announce@rubynet.org. I urge every developer
> > > >releasing ruby scripts, modules, or anyone having ruby-related
> > > >events to use this as your primary means of announcing your
> > > >information. It will cut down on volumes of email that we get
> > > >and make it easier to focus on the work at hand.
> 
> I'm not clear on how this would help me cut on down on e-mail,
> unless I stop reading ruby-talk.

I'm about 2 hairs away from putting -talk down next to my SPAM folder
and fully intend to move it down in my order of lists to read as soon
as this thread dies.  So in essence, yes, I plan on reading talk about
once every two weeks, at best.

> The announcement list is not guaranteed to carry all announcements,
> unless the list manager is watching all other lists for
> announcements not sent to the announcement list.

Correct.  announce@postgresql.org doesn't have every PostgreSQL
related announcement, neither does announce@apache.org (the other
project I forgot to mention that I track heavily).  Somethings will be
missed... but I'm willing to let a few things fall through the cracks
to save the time it'd take every day to read this list, I'm sure
others would agree as well.  An announcement on -talk is a pin-head
sized diamond in the desert, it happens once every 200-500 posts.

> If somebody has a new class or library, then they should add it to
> the RAA index.  Want to see what's new? Go to the RAA.

NO, WRONG!  This is the same broken attitude that promotes the use of
Wiki's, which, as far as I'm concerned are a black hole for information
and should be avoided at all costs.  Want to propagate information?
Setup a cvs commit emailer that sends out diffs.  Fire up a docbook
project and hand out cvs accounts left and right.  What do you have at
the end of a wiki?  A chunk of HTML and a community.  What do you have
at the end of a docbook +cvs exercise?  A publishable book that's
factual and reference-able.  Chris Morris's wiki/cvs commit dilly is of
interest to me because it could mean that wiki's will actually
broadcast raw information and will allow folks to stop having to hit
the website for changes... never mind the second step required to get a
diff.

> Use an RSS feed.

This will be used actually.  I've got a digest version of this that'll
send announce@ a nicely formatted email that has all of the modules
that are new from the last week and a list of all of the modules that
were updated.  The nice thing about this is that it gets _sent_ to me,
I don't have to go trolling around looking for information.

> > Honestly?  I don't really care.  -talk is close to -chat.  Most of
> > the 35K emails to ruby I've scanned over because they don't
> > interest me.  Not to say that what people are saying isn't
> > interesting, just that what they're talking about has little
> > relevance or bearing on my use of Ruby.
> 
> This seems like basically the same discussion that occurred back at
> the start of the year
> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/32121

I remember it vividly and instead of subjecting myself to stating my
opinion once and hoping that the content contained within would prove
to be useful in swaying opinions, but I'm going to be a PITA and reply
to almost every post on this topic until this horse is sufficiently
dead.  My apologies in advance for the ensuing missives (or hopefully
not).  I have no interest in responding to every email, but that seems
to be the way that discussions take place on this list so I'll join
the trend for a while.

> What has changed since then?

Hopefully there are more folk using Ruby for commercial applications
and are more people who are interested in talking about only Ruby as
it stands and being able to use it for its purposes as opposed to
slaughtering -talk with many well thought out, but still off topic,
posts about various nuances of programming.

> I have no trouble following the volume on ruby-talk, and can (still)
> easily pick what threads to follow or ignore.

It's not an issue of following the volume or content, it's caring
about the content.  When I send something to freebsd-net@freebsd.org
or subscribe to that list, I'm pretty much guaranteed that the topics
at hand are going to be network related and aren't going to pertain to
re-architecting FreeBSD's signal queuing or the latest SMP bungle from
Intel.  On the networking list, the topic sticks pretty close to
networking and the bits that flow in and out of various interfaces.
This may seem strange for -talk goers, but there are days where there
are only one or two posts, and others where there aren't any at
all!!!!  Novel concept.

> I can see a problem if a handful of people end up using ruby-talk
> for their personal project list, flooding the list with messages of
> little interest to 98% of the other subscribers.

Does academic interest in programming languages count as personal
project list?

> Still, if I ever decide that anybody has become hyperfocused on a
> topic no longer suited for ruby-talk, even after some public
> admonishment, I can simply add the name to my kill file.

But, if there were multiple mailing lists, we wouldn't have to tend to
this nearly as much.  I for one, don't moderate or filter anything
that goes to a list because off topic posts to a list get killed real
fast by a lack of interest.  There's something to be said for
community peer pressure for keeping things on topic.

> I'd rather first see social pressure used to contain off-topic or
> dead-horse threads before invoking fragmentation and possible
> isolation.  I have an interest in, for example, database
> programming, but I don't want to subscribe to a list solely on that
> topic, as database programming only occupies a relatively small and
> sporadic amount of my time.

Heh, speak of the devil.  I agree that social pressure helps keep
things within the bounds of Ruby, but that takes 10 emails to have go
into effect and is close to worthless on a list with the volume of
Ruby's.  Having a list that was dedicated only to database programming
would get close to no traffic, but when it did, it would hopefully
have the aggregate minds of the people who use or write database
software for Ruby.  Same goes for modruby@modruby.net, low volume,
high quality posts.  I like those kinds of lists.

> What I find troublesome is the implied message that people should
> *stop* using ruby-talk for an accepted practice (making
> announcements), and the suggestion that people who don't join the
> announcement-list bandwagon will miss out on future announcements.

announce@ will be cross posted to -talk by someone, you can't ever
escape that from happening, but its impractical for people to assume
that -talk is a good place for announcements pertaining to Ruby.
-talk is a good place for discussion, that's been prooven...  I don't
care about discussion so much though, only code, bugs, what's new, and
the specific bits here and there that pertain to what I'm doing.  I'm
sure I'm not alone.

> One thing I really like about ruby-talk is the opportunity for
> serendipity, something that would decrease over time as more lists
> are created. I want to be able to scan threads that aren't of an
> immediate interest to me, just to see what's going on.

I have no interest in that though, more correctly, no time.  I don't
want to preclude people from using -talk, it's clear that many like
Ruby and -talk because of this aspect.  I, however, for the sake of
taking a stance and position, am going to portray myself as a cold
hearted, self involved, corporate email machine that doesn't like any
of the fluff and only wants the the bits, diffs, and specific problems
for specific topics, that's it.  I can track lists here and there that
are on topic and focused, but long winded threads that last for weeks
at a time?  If a problem can't be solved inside of 10 emails, then
there's a communication problem or the discussion isn't a problem,
very rarely is it an actual problem that requires extensive public
discussion: I haven't seen an instance of that yet on -talk.

> More lists mean more work, less fun.

Or for the busy, means more fun because information gets prioritized
and categorized.  Roughly 10% of my email over the last year has been
Ruby email, of that, however, only 0.05% of it has been of interest.
If we had the other lists in place, that'd be an extra 9.95% of time
that I could spend on other things.  -sc

-- 
Sean Chittenden