Robert Goldman rpgoldman@sift.info writes:
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 ;-)
News, like lisp, are older than the Internet, perhaps they will survive it. ;-)
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?
Indeed. I think we should teach him gmane. The advantage of news, is that once you've got your answer, you don't need to further read them, as you do.
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.
From the standpoint of a user (or rather, a newbie), we should have a
global reflection and see what can be done for the whole lisp ecosystem.
For now, there are various irc channels, cll, google, mail lists, cliki.net, etc. The common lisp directory tried to centralize things somewhat, but there's nothing that looks like a definitive source.
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:
Wehn I go to http://stackoverflow.com, the first thing I see is not CL related, but about Python and Wordpress. (What's this Wordpress, I though the Internet was putting editors out of work).
What about making this the official support channel?
If that's agreeable, we could list it, as well as the launchpad, in the manual.
There are existing channels, and new channels. Why newbies couldn't ask their questions on twitter or facebook? Why oldbies couldn't answer questions on nntp or maillists? What I think would be nice is a multi-modality gateway, with a centralized domain name and web site for best visibility, that would cover Common Lisp and all its ecosystem. We could probably use common-lisp.net as root, integrate source of CL information and every communication channel around it.