[CentOS] new list proposal

William L. Maltby CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com
Thu Oct 16 10:08:40 UTC 2008


On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 22:54 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Karanbir Singh wrote:
> > And to better cater to these conversations, as well as further encourage 
> > such content, we'd like to propose creating a 'centos-tech' list.
> 
> Also, all comments are welcome!
> 
> If there is a general feeling that this would help, then we will go 
> ahead and setup the new list in the next few days.

I think this is not a good solution. I've read all the other posts in
this thread and there are a lot of good points. But...

Since I've been on the list, it has *always* appeared to me to be not
CentOS-specific. It rather appears to be mostly admin-centric. Both
experienced and inexperienced users have posted, been helped, helped
others. It has been, fortunately, mostly related to CentOS in that the
posters are trying to do something on CentOS, not BSD, UNIX, .... It
should, of course, remain so. Nevertheless, the primary focus seems
towards administration, not CentOS.

The "enforcement" of "CentOSicity" has been sporadic and arbitrary. The
"sporadic" part has allowed this to become a very informative, usually
friendly and productive tool. It reflects, IMO, the nature of its
constituency.

The "arbitrary" part has raised my hackles, even though I'm not the
target (usually). "Got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning"
usually crosses my mind.

My feeling is that what has been generally tolerated on the list should
continue: help with mail setup, wifi doesn't work, recommend <insert
your hardware here>, php, browser problems, raid, file systems, ... you
can see that very little is CentOS. But usually it is at least on a
CentOS system.

Because CentOS "just works" for so many, this list would really have
very few posts that are on topic: upgrade 4.x->5.x broke my system (read
the archives, that's not recommended), I can't get my wifi to work on
5.x (that hardware is too new - go get the driver from...), etc.

A great number of these would be administration problems, not CentOS
problems, and also would spawn tangential threads. They would then be
referred to the new list, which would now look like this one used to
look. Cross postings would begin to occur as many topics would be
difficult to initially categorize. Is it a CentOS problem or a wetware
problem?

My recommendation is that this list continue as it has, with the
exception of the arbitrary enforcement of "CentOSicity". This should be
either consistently enforced, reducing the utility and population of
this list, or only enforced that you must be using/administering/setting
up... a CentOS system.

This will acknowledge the nature of an "enterprise class" user, continue
to support the growth of CentOS, aid the user in innumerable ways, ...

For those who want a much narrower scope of topics, start lists for
them. From the day I first subscribed, the reality has been that this
list has been:

- technologies
- best practices
- deployment strategies and tools
- management strategies and tools

to quote you, along with the other things I've mentioned. Local filters,
<DEL>, etc. can handle the chores for those that want a very narrow
view.

MHO
-- 
Bill




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