use a news server? (was Re: python-dev summary, Jan. 16-31)

[Andrew Dalke]

Tim wrote:
>I liked life better when language changes were slugged out on
>c.l.py.  There are soooooo many archives and semi-private
>mailing lists and utterly pvt emails now-- and all of them,
> like this msg, with useless Subject lines -- I
>just don't know where to look anymore either.  And I spend hours
>on this stuff every day of my miserable life.

*Sniff* I remember the good old days, when there were only
a couple of messages a day and I looked forward to reading
each one.  *Siff*, *sniff*  Now I just hit "kill thread" a
lot :)  Maybe I should start using another language as
obscure as Python was 5 years ago.

>he's been pushing to
>move discussions to venues like egroups for at least a year.

Here's a thought.  Why not set up an NNTP server for
python development?

Bear in mind that I know nothing about how complicated that
is, but here's what I'm thinking about.

Keep c.l.py around as the main list.  Have a new news server
for development only, with a single main group which is
python-dev.  Newsgroups can be moderated or unmoderated,
and I imagine it would be easy to automatically pass on
mail from specified people.

When a discussion thread gets to be too involved, create
a new newsgroup (which can be open or closed) and spin off
the discussions there.  Newsgroup creation can be done
very easily, if the alt.* groups are any indication.

If someone like me wants to follow the articles, I just
connect to the news server and see which groups are
available.  This lets me use all my local tools for reading,
threading an searching rather than depending on pipermail.
It can even be better since I only need to download the
archive once rather than (as I was yesterday) flipping back
and forth among different pages.  It also lets me read
attachements directly.

Archiving of newsgroups can be done by keeping all
posts and/or migrating old posts to a pipermail archive.
And of course people who want to use email can use
standard gateways between news and mail.

Why wouldn't this work?

                    Andrew
                    dalke at acm.org