[arch-general] Arch mailing list for subjective discussions

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 05/18/2013 08:34 PM, Joan Rieu wrote:
> 2013/5/18 Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net>
> 
>> This comes into my mind, when I read a statement about the policy of
>> Mint, thread: "Fully wroking GTK3(+GTK2) theme for Gnome 3.8?"
>>
>> E.g. desktop environments require sometimes discussions that IMO don't
>> belong to Arch general, but there perhaps is the need to compare notes.
>>
> 
> Hi Ralf,
> 
> IMHO, the example you give explains why using the forum would be more
> appropriate.
> 
> Long technical discussions are of course interesting, provided you care
> about the topic, which is not always the case. What this means is that you
> might start receiving tens of emails that you really have no interest in.
> You might say "you're not forced to join the ML", but I think it's not an
> option since some topics will be of interest to me for sure and I would
> like to follow those.
> 

There are two solutions to this:

a) Use a mail reader which can actually handle a larger mail volume more
sanely. (Filters, or a mail reader which can "kill" threads so that you
don't receive future replies on a given thread, etc.)

b) Use Gmane.org to give you an NNTP interface to mailing lists and use
a news reader -- high-volume lists is what NTTP and news readers were
meant for. (I'm using Thunderbird.) It's trivial to set up and
effortlessly lets you follow along in lots and lots of mailing lists
without having to set up any mail client magic.

> On the other side, a forum allows you to focus on the discussions you
> really care about, and you can just ignore the irrelevant threads.

You still have to actively go to the specific Arch forums to keep up
with replies, etc. There's no unified "show me everything new in all the
forums I'm a member of" page where I can go to keep up.

That's a much bigger problem for many mail-oriented users than setting
up a filter or two.

Regards,