Question about this list

[Ben Gamari]

Excerpts from Amahdy's message of Wed Jan 27 21:40:21 -0500 2010:
> >* >Mailing lists are the lifeblood of most open source projects.
> > *>*
> > *>* Always wondering why!! why not move on to a *group*
> > *>*
> > *A better question would be why _should we_ move on to a "group." I see
> > no clear answer to this question.
> >
> If you don't want a feauture, you can disable it (like not putting external
> plugins in this mailing list and keep it that simple), google-groups offers
> to disable whatever you don't want to, but as for my suggestion to move, I
> already mentioned many of them: starting from bugs (I come here with 3 of
> them till now), and by lowering costs ... I already tried to explain many
> things yet not all of them, why u don't tell me the idea maybe I could see
> your point of view.

You still haven't answered my question. I still have yet to see a single
argument for switching away from our existing infrastructure other than
"gee whiz, look at all of these pretty features!"

I know of no bugs in mailman. It has been used by hundreds of projects
for years. If you are experiencing issues the problem is almost
certainly sitting between the chair and keyboard.

Frankly, the economic argument is anything but convincing. I've seen no
evidence to suggest that the overhead of running a mailman server is
anything resembling onerous. It takes far more CPU-hours to serve
bugzillas, wikis, and static HTML than it does to bounce a few hundred
emails a day.

> As I said, you can disable whatever you don't like as feature, google-groups
> by default is HTML-disabled and could be fixed-width font-type (which I
> prefer because it looks like the code) ... but just tell me the
> administration overhead for managing a google-group is harder than the case
> for this mailing list server??? simple task here: preventing spam, which is
> completely out of my *head* at google-groups.
>
The last thing any of us need is to worry about disabling yet more
largely undesired features. I want a mailing list engine to distribute
emails sent to it.  Nothing more and nothing less.

> 
> If you like your console, you still can receive the emails through rss, I
> don't know how you read emails now to argue but I guess (maybe I'm wrong
> here) that xml-reader will be much easier, or organized, or as I said I
> won't argue here but definitely there is a way out here. At least ask
> Mozilla hackers what they do.

I have absolutely no desire to receive email through RSS. RSS was
designed for a completely different use-case than email.
News != discussion. Again, we already have a system that pretty much
anyone can use easily and efficiently. The onus is on _you_ to
demonstrate that there is good cause to change what has worked for
literally decades.

> > As I mentioned before, I think the Google Groups archive interface is a
> > perfect example of why it shouldn't be used for technical discussion. It
> > is a user-interface nightmare.
> >
> >
> Don't know why, maybe you can say that on Yahoo-groups or any service that
> focus on design and styles but google, uuh .. ?
> 

Again, I challenge you to try following a thread longer than 5 messages
on Google groups. It's simple not possible.

- Ben