[OT] Re: Tango heap is dangerous

[Nick Sabalausky]

"David Wilson" <dw at botanicus.net> wrote in message 
news:mailman.145.1224205022.3087.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> [Pointing this at the discussion list again]
>
> 2008/10/16 Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a>:
>> "David Wilson" <dw at botanicus.net> wrote in message
>> news:mailman.142.1224175522.3087.digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com...
>>> Would it be too much to ask for people to *stop* *having*
>>> *conversations* on the *announce* group? :)
>>
>> Would it be too much to ask people to stop top-posting? ;)
>
> While there are trivial technological solutions to rendering
> top-posted e-mail efficiently (Gmail, ...), classifying natural
> language text is still imperfect, and so we continue to manually
> maintain the classifications ourselves in order to make sense of it
> all...
>
>>
>> But anyway, I think it's pretty well understood that the announcements 
>> are
>> just the top-level posts. Nobody's going to make an announcement further
>> down the tree unless they don't want it to really be much of an
>> "announcement".
>>
>> And it seems silly for something that starts on one group to
>> suddenly switch over to a different group for its own discussion.
>
> My understanding of every "-announce" list I've ever been subscribed
> to is that they are used for announcements, apparently with the
> exception of D's. Keeping this so doesn't have to be difficult; on
> mailing lists I've seen people use the (shock) "Reply-To" or
> "Mail-Followup-To" headers, and on Usenet "Followup-To".
>
> Enforcing it is simply a case of assigning a moderator to the relevant 
> group.
>
> I'm not just being pedantic here. I have low volume groups like this
> flowing into a single folder which is presently lighting up every day,
> and as I rush to find out what new, or potentially important things
> await, I'm saddened to discover it's just yet another conversation
> about D that should be on a discussion list. This voids any benefit of
> having a separate announce list to begin with.
>
> It leaves me a single technological option for returning my folder to
> a normative state: unsubscribing. While I'm not going to do that,
> there are others who may, those with less free time to read dhasenan's
> latest moans about Tango, etc., who may take from it a negative
> impression of the community and ultimately of the language, and for a
> small language that is an undesirable lost chance at free evangelism.
>
> Apologies for the rant, but this minor lack of adherence to netiquette
> is damaging my work flow. :)
>

The top-level posts are announcements, the sub posts are discussions of the 
announcements. Notifying a user only when a new top-level message arrives 
has a trivial technological solution.

If you're complaining that the original "Tango heap is dangerous" post 
wasn't an announcement, well, I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but I would 
say that's debatable.

As far as other newsgroups, I'd don't care how they do it.

Anyone who avoids D over something as trivial as "They don't move 
announcement discussions over to a different group" is going to end up 
finding 100 other trivialities to bitch about and consider deal-breakers no 
matter what we do.

If Walter went and changed the announcements group to accept top-level 
posts-only, or true announcements only, and reply/discussion used headers or 
something to get forwarded over to the main discussion thread, then fine, I 
wouldn't stand against it. But it's hardly an issue.