Re: List traffic

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 7:38 AM, Marc G. Fournier <scrappy(at)hub(dot)org> wrote:
>> most people are not prepared to understand the concept of more than
>> one list for project...
>
> Apparently you don't use very many large projects ... FreeBSD has 20+ lists,
> dedicated to various aspects of both end user and developer ... I imagine
> Linux has *as many if not more* ... MySQL, if memory servers, has a half
> dozen or more ... etc ...

Sure, if we have distinctions which make sense then having separate
lists makes sense. Linux has separate lists for different drivers,
different parts of the kernel, projects to improve the kernel in
various specific ways (latency, etc). I'm all for having a list
dedicated to infrastructure (oddly named -www here) and a list
dedicated to printing flyers and arranging conferences (-advocacy)
since those topics are usually well defined. Lists like -ecpg or -odbc
would work fine if the traffic warranted them.

But some of the lists we have now are 99% overlap with each other -- I
claim because the definitions are meaningless. What part of postgres
discussion (aside from this thread) *don't* relate in some way to SQL?
Or administration? Or performance? Most performance problems end up
being solved by adjusting SQL or changing GUCs. Mot administration
questions are originally posed as general help questions. If you're
subscribed to these lists you get a random, fairly small, subset of
discussion related these topics.

Perhaps what I'm looking for is a more sensible division that allows
most of the traffic related to the subtopics to actually go there. It
would have to be a division so clearcut that anyone who doesn't follow
could reasonably be blamed for not following etiquette. That's simply
not true with the current divisions.

--
greg