Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:45:01 +0100 From: "Julian Stacey" <jhs@berklix.org> To: Edwin Groothuis <edwin@mavetju.org> Cc: FreeBSD Advocacy <advocacy@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: National mailinglists - why isn't it there yet? Message-ID: <200803022345.m22Nj1L3069612@fire.js.berklix.net> In-Reply-To: Your message "Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:50:19 %2B1100." <20080302215019.GA2949@k7.mavetju>
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> I think that the question dropped by Edw was more of why this service > wasn't offered from the FreeBSD mailman infrastructure. I think > that every country and state has its own mailman/majordomo/ezmlm/whatever > features, but none are ran centrally. > > Edwin Local language lists best left in national domain spaces IMO, so the admin of national traffic problems is resolved with least effort. + also a uniform international naming convention Might be nice, but a name like questions@your-country.freebsd.org or questions-your-country@freebsd.org might not be acceptable for some countries where eg "questions" might mean something inappropriate, or need a char set. I think it unlikely & undesirable we'll see centrally run lists. The extra work for the central mailman-owner: I guess mailman-owner@freebsd.org is happy/wise to avoid the nightmare of local languages & character sets & leave it to locals within each delegated your-country.freebsd.org DNS name space. Imagine the extra work if less multi lingually skilled start dumping extra mail list problems on the international administrators, some in Spanish, French, German, Chinese, etc &/or in worse than than normal international English. Would volunteer want extra unpaid work sorting it ? Apart from bounces, warnings etc, even just getting eg List description updates in many national font sets would be a pain. Better if the work went direct to a fellow national who could read it easily. What benefit/ trying to centrally administer foreign lists ? Example: A Swiss German told me in '85 that German programmers who could read English tended to be better programmers than fellow Germans who struggled in English. Since then PCs have become more pervasive, & there'll be more computer books in more local languages, but on average, the concept likely tends to be true for most language groups: Those who've known Unix longest, probably are more skilled, & more used to reading Unix manuals & lists in English, & more likely to be using international list anyway (& if they're on local lists at all, mostly to help their less skilled nationals). There'll be a few exceptions to prove the rule, eg laptop code first developed on Japanese hosted FreeBSD lists. But over all, I guess FreeBSD can still best expect to benefit from more diffs etc posted by more skilled users on the international current@freebsd.org etc than simple end user non contributor traffic on questions@your-local-country.freebsd.org traffic Examples of URLs to local language mail lists: http://www.de.freebsd.org/community/mailinglists.html http://www.fr.freebsd.org/community/mailinglists.html http://www.kr.freebsd.org/support.shtml#mailing-list http://www.freebsd.de/mailinglists.html points to domo@ majordomo@nl.FreeBSD.org. Yes, not all admins use same list tools, so not orthogonal naming. Julian -- Julian Stacey: BSDUnixLinux C Prog Admin SysEng Consult Munich www.berklix.com Mail just Ascii plain text. HTML & Base64 is spam.
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