[asdf-devel] Some points raised

[Robert Goldman]

On 9/24/10 Sep 24 -6:08 PM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
> Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info>
> writes:
> 
>> On 9/24/10 Sep 24 -9:26 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
>>> Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info>
>>> writes:
>>>
>>>> On 9/24/10 Sep 24 -9:07 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
>>>>> Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info>
>>>>> writes:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On 9/24/10 Sep 24 -3:49 AM, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll wrote:
>>
>> ....
>>
>>>>>>> 2- Lack *-user mailing list and need of subscription for questions. Is
>>>>>>> there a sufficiently large comunity here and do we want to open the list?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> With all due respect, opening a list is pretty much never a good idea.
>>>>>> It's just asking for spam.  Per my response to the above complainer, I
>>>>>> think it would be great if there was a help web site that
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1.  Allowed OpenID login --- no need for new accounts
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 2.  Served up questions to the interested through email digest and RSS.
>>>>>>  As a potential question-answerer, I don't have time to log in to such a
>>>>>> web site.  I would need to have the questions pushed at me.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Is there any such existing software that we could adopt?
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm using gmane, and the overhead to subscribe is really minimal: just
>>>>> reply to a message gmane sends back the first time you post...
>>>>
>>>> So should we just set up an asdf-help mailing list?
>>>
>>> For me it would be an easy and good enough solution, yes.
>>
>> What's the protocol for potential help providers?  How do we scan an
>> asdf-help group of this type without (1) further clogging our inboxes;
>> (2) having to explicitly visit a web site?
> 
> gmane is a nntp server.
> 
> 
>> Is there, e.g., an RSS-based solution so that we might, for example,
>> glance over recent requests for help while scanning our blog
>> subscriptions in Google Reader?
> 
> There's also http://gwene.org/ to pull back rss to nntp...
> 
> So you only need gnus to read those message.
> 
> But I object to rss for two reasons:
> 
> 1- often the message is not complete, you only get the beginning and you
>    have to go to the web to read the rest.
> 
> 2- there's no way to answer.  At least, with gmane, there's an
>    nntp-to-email back gateway. 
> 

Yes, but the advantage of rss is that one can easily scan a large set of
things in a single glance in a tool that one runs anyway.  I glance at
Google Reader at least once a day.  I never run gnus, and I have one
newsreader window in Thunderbird that I never look at, but am too lazy
to delete.

This may not matter --- I may be atypical in this --- but I have
completely given up on nntp.  The only thing broken worse than email on
the internet is news ;-)

On the other hand, I can see the advantages to myself of an asdf-help
mailing list that I have a good excuse never to look at .... ;-)

Maybe we should take a straw poll on this mailing list to see what forms
of asdf-help delivery would be most likely to get attention from people
who are most likely to read.

A second question is:  is this really necessary for any reason other
than making Didier happy, which seems unlikely in any case?

What is broken about having people post questions to asdf-devel?
Didier's objection to asdf-devel is that he didn't want to sign up for
the mailing list.  Why would it make him any happier to sign up for
asdf-help instead of asdf-devel?

>From the standpoint of a user who sometimes wants help, I would think
the best choice would be something forum like, where I could sign in
using OpenID, so I didn't need a new account and password.

I just looked at StackOverflow, and there is an asdf tag there, and one
can get updates to that tag using RSS.

That forum seems to meet Didier's needs --- no new account, no mailing
list signup, and all of mine.

This URL seems to work:

http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag?tagnames=asdf&sort=hot

What about making this the official support channel?

If that's agreeable, we could list it, as well as the launchpad, in the
manual.

best,
r