TOO MUCH VOLUME -- a proposal

[Justin Sheehy]

Fare Rideau <rideau@ens.fr> writes:

>    there is definitely TOO MUCH volume on the LispOS mailing list,

I disagree.  People just don't have good enough mailreaders.  :-)

Seriously, I've seen mailing lists with higher volume, and I don't
think that this is a big deal.

Wasn't the mailing list created specifically to get this traffic out
of comp.os.lisp (and a few other groups)?

If so, why complain that the traffic has actually come here?  I think
that it is great that so many people are interested and are making
their thoughts known.

If someone actually goes to all of the trouble of having
comp.os.lispos created, great.  I think that an alt.* group would be a
waste of time, though.

> most of which is flames due to people not knowing/understanding

I seriously haven't noticed any real flaming going on.  The majority
of the people here seem able to disagree without sinking to the level
of personal attacks.

> Plus the ephemeral nature of e-mail discussions (even when archived)
> hides the meaningful information in the volume,
> instead of making it persistent.

At this point, the list is not here to present any form of permanently
archived information (there isn't really any of that yet) but rather
to be a medium for discussion of ideas and (hopefully soon)
implementation details.

For a large-scale widespread project like this, email is the best tool
for the job.

> What I propose is that discussion be moved *OUT* of the list.
> into each of the subscribees' WWW page.

This is a silly suggestion.

The web is just about the worst place for a "discussion".

Web pages should definitely created once there is some actual work to
be documented.  We can use the web for information such as general
information/ description of the project, task and subproject lists,
perhaps a FAQ, and pointers to code that people have written.

These would all be good things to put on a web page.

None of these things exist yet.

The actual discussion would suffer greatly in that medium, and I wager
that several of the people reading this would also be completely
unable to participate in such a crippled discussion.

> It seems to me that *candidate* projects for grouping would include:
> various-Applications-on-top-of-CL,
> CMUCL-extensions-toward-an-OS,
> deeply-reflective-system-with-a-basic-modular-lisp-under-CL,
> Persistent-Store-for-some-of-the-above,
> some-of-the-above-with-Scheme-(EuLisp?)-instead-of-CL,
> hacking-with-Flux-instead-of-Unix-below,
> etc.

Perhaps some of these should have their own lists, but not until they
are sufficiently defined so as to be projects in their own right and
not just tangents to general discussion about LispOS (or whatever name
this ends up with).

>    Please no flames, but explanations and argued advocacy
> on your page instead. Cross references to each-other's
> good and bad arguments welcome.

Sorry, but this just kind of discussion is just not going to work by
pointing at web pages.

Followups and replies ought to be right here on this mailing list.

> Contributions welcome.

I am hoping to actually contribute something useful to this project at
some point, but I am less experienced than many of the posters here so
I am remaining fairly quiet on most technical issues atm.

-Justin