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- From: wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius)
- Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
- Subject: Re: Why not splitting this group?
- Message-ID: <1993Jan27.214453.2657@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
- Date: 27 Jan 93 21:44:53 GMT
- References: <1k67fiEINN939@uni-erlangen.de>
- Organization: University of Helsinki
- Lines: 82
-
- unrzf0@cip.rrze.uni-erlangen.de (Carl Scheuermann) writes:
- >I know, there has been a lot of talking about splitting this group.
-
- You can say that again.
-
- >But I can't understand, why it isn't possible to find a solution to this
- >problem.
-
- There is no problem. There are fine, well-working guidelines for
- creating new groups. These guidelines are explained in detail in one
- of the postings in news.announce.newusers. One part of the guidelines
- states that if an attempt at creating a new group fails, there should
- be a six month period until the next attempt. Otherwise those who
- want to create the group could just try to do it again, and there
- would be little room for any other discussion. So, it would be
- possible (and likely) to force the creation of a group, even against
- the wishes of most people, by trying, and trying, and trying, and
- trying, until the opposers get tired and give up.
-
- As it happens, there was an attempt at splitting up c.o.l some time
- ago, but it only resulted in the creation of comp.os.linux.announce,
- and all the other proposed groups failed. We are now living the six
- month period, which should end sometime around the end of May or
- beginning of June, if I remember correctly. Until then, trying to
- create new groups is futile.
-
- BTW, before proposing new groups, it is a good idea to familiarize
- oneself with the guidelines, and also with the already existing
- groups.
-
- >There are so many questions on how to install the XServer. So
- >why not creating a group comp.os.linux.X11.
-
- It already exists, although it is called comp.window.x.i386unix (not
- every group that is of value for Linuxers have "linux" as part of
- their name, and why should they?). Similarly, groups like
- comp.unix.programmer, comp.unix.shell, comp.unix.questions and so on
- are valuable for Linuxers as well.
-
- >Or, for the people working with TCP/IP, making a group
- >comp.os.linux.TCP?
-
- For the people _working_ on it, there is a well-working (I assume)
- mailing list. People who use it post questions to c.o.l. At the
- moment, there are a number of those questions posted, partly because
- networking is a new phenomenon under Linux and partly because there
- are still problems with it under Linux. After the code becomes
- bugfree enough, there will be much less questions having to do with
- networking. The same thing has been observed with, for example, GCC:
- during the summer, there was plenty of confusion about how GCC should
- be installed in order to work properly (it was all spelled out in
- detail in the documentation, but presumably not clearly enough since
- there was so much confusion). After easier ways to do the
- installation came to the rescue (can you say SLS?), the number of GCC
- questions dropped to almost zero. If we had, as was suggested at the
- time, created a newsgroup for GCC, it would be more or less empty now.
- This is an important issue when creating newsgroups: the group will be
- here to stay, so creating groups based on particular, temporary topics
- is not a good idea.
-
- But I guess we'll be discussing this in excruciating detail come June.
- :-)
-
- >Please don't kill me if I say something that has been said a lot of times.
-
- You take all the fun of this. I was already looking forward to one
- more mark on the handle of my flame-thrower. :-)
-
- >But the current state of this group isn't bearable any more -
-
- Depends on the reader, I guess. I have no problems with the current
- volume of the group (the contents, on the other hand, is a different
- issue).
-
- >and it WILL get worse.
-
- Hm..., I haven't measured it, but I have a feeling that the volume of
- c.o.l actually hasn't increased very much lately.
-
- --
- Lars.Wirzenius@helsinki.fi (finger wirzeniu@klaava.helsinki.fi)
- MS-DOS, you can't live with it, you can live without it.
-