On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 10:25:22AM +0200, Giorgos Keramidas wrote: > I only mentioned why the mailing list should be where all discussion > takes place because you seem to be pushing so hard about 'the wiki' > (as in 'mentioning every couple of posts or so'). > > That's fine. I've been considering responding to this thread for quite some time, but have sat quiet until now. I knew this would happen, sigh... Wikis are not for this sort of thing. They are for community-managed documentation of a subject -- they are not for bug tracking, troubleshooting, or patch-providing. Yes, I am aware that there are Wikis all over the place that are being used for this sort of thing, and those people should really reconsider what they're using the Wiki for. Yes, I am fairly opinionated on this matter. Here's some facts about Wikis which apply to this specific scenario: Wikis are completely and totally chaotic: - Person A visits the Wiki, sees Information Point X. Person A then goes off to write a patch over the course of 24-48 hours, to address the problem in Information Point X. - Within that 24-48 hours, Person B has decided to update the Wiki with "new information", including such things as removing Information Point X entirely. - 24-48 hours later, Person A posts a patch to the mailing list where the Wiki was mentioned. Person B responds "That's a non- issue/no longer a problem, did you not read the Wiki?" - Above usually does not happen with mailing lists, simply because people consider mail more important/more real-time than a Wiki. Wikis make following conversations impossible: - Look at Wikipedia's "Discussion" tabs sometime; HI I THNK BLA BLA AND WHOEVUR FOOBARBLAT IZ YEAH WELL UR RONG LOL ~~~~MYNAME). Yeah, that's a really good way to communicate. *blink* - A Wiki should not be used as a mailing list replacement. The instant I saw "I've got this Wiki for all of this" posted, I knew this entire issue was going to become impossible to follow, and would drive developers batty. > PS: Your mailer seems to be stripping off attribution lines, which makes > it a bit hard to follow deeply nested quotes. Can you please check to > see if there's an option to fix that? I do the same thing (case point). Deeply-nested quotes become incredibly annoying when you have to skip 4-5 pages of quotes just to get to the reply. It's much easier to use a mail client that has decent threading support (mutt for example), and for recalling what someone said, look back a couple thread entries. But at least he's not top-posting, right? ;-) -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |Received on Tue Nov 06 2007 - 08:06:22 UTC
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