Re: Upcoming Changes to News Server ...

On 12/1/2004 1:25 PM, Woodchuck Bill wrote:

> Jan, Gary may be blunt at times, but try to understand things from his
> perspective. He is posting to Usenet. He expects his replies to appear on
> Usenet. You are accustomed to your way of writing and reading messages. He
> is accustomed to his way. Perhaps a bit overstated, his point is that if
> [...]

Do I really have to try to understand things from his perspective?

Please realize that nearly all of the long standing developers, key
community members and active supporters of the PostgreSQL project have
usenet experience. People like Gary are one of the reasons why we prefer
using mailing lists to do our communication today, and it has served us
well over several years. The short survey among these people (who are
the ones answering the vast majority of questions on our lists) showed
that basically none of us would consider using news instead of these
mailing lists.

We have also developed the habit to use group-reply to all header
addresses since many of us (due to the high email volume) use some kind
of email sorting and filtering programs (like procmail) to not find all
list email in our inbox, but to find emails that are in reply to our own
messages there, or in special folders.

And there you have the real problem and incompatibility. The PostgreSQL
developers and experts are all on the mailing lists, and they will stay
there and most probably continue to use group reply most of the time.
That means that as long as postings to the newsgroups are gated to the
lists, the people asking questions on the newsgroups will find email
answers in their inbox, and if we stop gating from news to lists they
will get very few answers from the experts because we don't even see the
questions. I don't know if some "I guess ..." from another newbie is as
helpfull as an answer from Tom Lane backed by code knowledge, but that
is what most answers on the news side without gating would probably look
like.

Gary threatened to report any further email from me as harassment to
abuse(at)yahoo and abuse(at)comcast(dot) The IMHO correct measurement to that was
to add a kill line to the news->list gateway that just stops his
postings to get into my (or anybody elses) way. The kill line got added
and nobody on the mailing lists will see his postings any more.
Fortunately most people involved in PostgreSQL are very level headed,
have a high level of tolerance and usually real world problems. The
newsgroup stirrup that dragged all the net.kook attention will calm down
and Gary will find another "field of work" pretty soon. The people
posting questions via news will learn that and why they get the real
answers via email to their inbox. And they will care as little about it
as they did so far, because the DBA who has a production database at
halt in the middle of the night really doesn't care how the answer that
gets his server going again arrived, he is stressed, overworked and has
way bigger fish to fry than "an email response to a news posting isn't
correct, your lists are broken, yadda, yadda". He does the happydance
for getting an answer in 2 hours without dialing through 3 hotline levels.

So to answer my own question: No, I don't have to try to understand
things from his perspective. Gary Burnore is irrelevant, will disappear
very soon and we will just continue to go about our business, help real
people with real database related problems.

Jan

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