On 22/11/2010, at 10:22 PM, Gurjeet Singh wrote:
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 1:07 AM, Thom Brown
<thom@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As has been said previously, an unlinked forum (one which has no
interaction with the mailing list) is destined to fail, as others have
in the past. It's creates a fragmented community and poor support on
such a forum would reflect badly on the PostgreSQL community.
Mailing lists aren't "old school". They've just got a long history,
and I think you'll find most open source projects probably have a
mailing list (or several) associated with them. But the reason why a
forum hasn't been rejected out of hand is that we recognise that there
is a demographic which probably see a mailing list as a barrier, hence
our discussion about integrating a bidirection sync between a forum
and a mailing list. And the reason why we like that idea is that it
ensures that people who would only join a forum benefit from the huge
pool of knowledge and experience of users on the mailing list.
How about exposing our archives in the forum format (linear conversations, like GMail), and allowing registered users to send emails using a web form which automatically copies the mailing list. This would require real time update of archives, which I think currently takes a few minutes for a message to show up.
This way all of our conversation history would be available even in forum format.
That's the easy part - it already does all that. I could load in the last 10 years of mailing lists in a matter of hours. But another mailing list reader isn't that valuable. If this is going to be done it's going to be done right and that means complete interoperability with the mailing list.
It's great that postgres is free and "owed by nobody" but one slight drawback is that nobody really has the authority to put their foot down and just say "This is what we're going to do."
I feel we are getting to a resolution, just very slowly.
Regards,
--
gurjeet.singh
@ EnterpriseDB - The Enterprise Postgres Company
http://www.EnterpriseDB.com
singh.gurjeet@{ gmail | yahoo }.com
Twitter/Skype: singh_gurjeet
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