Re: We can halve volume by not allowing nondevelopers to post

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

Oscar Levi wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 22, 1999 at 01:52:00PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > Several people have claim that my suggestion to close -devel to
> > nondeveloper postings only makes sense if I consider all those
> > postings to be valueless.

> On reading this thread, I find my sympathy lies with Ian.  Volume is a
> big problem for me and lists.  I recently enabled a mail sorter and
> started to use mutt.  These things help, but I don't have time to wade
> through d-devel with adequate care.  It's coming close to the volume
> of l-kernel but the content tends toward politics instead of technical
> issues.

This reminds me of the Thatcherite Syllogism:

  Something must be Done
  This is Something
  ----------------------
  Therefore, This must be Done

I have seen nothing to indicate that closing the list to non-developers
will improve the quality of the list.  If the objective is to halve
the volume of debian-devel, without regard for quality, then we can
most easily achieve this by rejecting every other submission.  You
will have to show that your solution is better than that.

> I'd prefer to leave readership open to the public and posting limited
> to developers.  Anyone unsunscribed who needs to post can send to the
> maintainer of the package in question, or a maintainer of a related
> package.

Before taking such extreme measures, we should try approaches such as
opening a debian-unstable list.  I think it would also help to add
a one-line summary of the list charter to the bottom of each mail
(we already use this for debian-private).

Richard Braakman