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in reply to Best way to do distributed development discussion
in thread Perl 6 feature that scares me the most:

It just seems to make more sense to have one central copy of the information rather than sending a gazillion copies of the same stuff to every subscriber. Especially as most of the content of each mail is 30 lines of header, 500 lines of c&p from the previous thread(s), 1 line on new information (or, more usually, a sarcastic comment:), then 10 more lines of sig.

I exagerate I know -- I have had an inherent hatred of mailing lists since I spent some time working inside IBM using the APAR system. Every damn message contains a copy of everything thats gone before.

I'm not really convinced by the arguments of offline use or bad editors. I produced this reply in my own editor and the c&p'd into the edit field. I realise, I way to late to effect the process, but I thought I'd ask.

Now, if only groups.google.com didn't insist that my browser has the cookies turned off (which it doesn't, though I'm pretty selective about which one I let through), then I could interact that way. I'll work it out one day.


Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -Richard Buckminster Fuller


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Re: Re: Best way to do distributed development discussion
by Elian (Parson) on May 30, 2003 at 20:30 UTC
    Well, if you really like web interfaces that much... yay you, I guess. Most of us involved find them useful for archival access, but sub-optimal for everything else. We sometimes work off-line, we sometimes find ourselves with limited 'net access, and we sometimes find that the central server's gone toes-up and is unavailable. (And I'm pretty sure if I put forth "You just edit all your messages in an external editor and cut'n'paste them into the web form" to the list as a whole they'd hunt me down and kill me....)

    The web's good for a lot of stuff. This just doesn't happen to be one of them.

      Fair enough. It's JARA! (Just another religious argument) -- like emacs -v- vi etc. etc. -- and I'm on the wrong side of it:) I'll live with it.

      Thanks for the feedback.


      Examine what is said, not who speaks.
      "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
      "When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -Richard Buckminster Fuller


        FWIW I agree with the man here.. and personally I like mailing lists. Also, although of course it's not necessary to send a copy of each message to everyone, you also end up send a lot of (ephemeral) copies for display to a web forum's participants.

        Really what we need is a New And Improved version of NNTP.

        Makeshifts last the longest.