From: wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: Why not splitting this group?
Date: 27 Jan 93 21:44:53 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

unrzf0@cip.rrze.uni-erlangen.de (Carl Scheuermann) writes:
>I know, there has been a lot of talking about splitting this group.

You can say that again.

>But I can't understand, why it isn't possible to find a solution to this
>problem.

There is no problem.  There are fine, well-working guidelines for
creating new groups.  These guidelines are explained in detail in one
of the postings in news.announce.newusers.  One part of the guidelines
states that if an attempt at creating a new group fails, there should
be a six month period until the next attempt.  Otherwise those who
want to create the group could just try to do it again, and there
would be little room for any other discussion.  So, it would be
possible (and likely) to force the creation of a group, even against
the wishes of most people, by trying, and trying, and trying, and
trying, until the opposers get tired and give up.

As it happens, there was an attempt at splitting up c.o.l some time
ago, but it only resulted in the creation of comp.os.linux.announce,
and all the other proposed groups failed.  We are now living the six
month period, which should end sometime around the end of May or
beginning of June, if I remember correctly.  Until then, trying to
create new groups is futile.

BTW, before proposing new groups, it is a good idea to familiarize
oneself with the guidelines, and also with the already existing
groups.

>There are so many questions on how to install the XServer. So
>why not creating a group comp.os.linux.X11. 

It already exists, although it is called comp.window.x.i386unix (not
every group that is of value for Linuxers have "linux" as part of
their name, and why should they?).  Similarly, groups like
comp.unix.programmer, comp.unix.shell, comp.unix.questions and so on
are valuable for Linuxers as well.

>Or, for the people working with TCP/IP, making a group
>comp.os.linux.TCP?

For the people _working_ on it, there is a well-working (I assume)
mailing list.  People who use it post questions to c.o.l.  At the
moment, there are a number of those questions posted, partly because
networking is a new phenomenon under Linux and partly because there
are still problems with it under Linux.  After the code becomes
bugfree enough, there will be much less questions having to do with
networking.  The same thing has been observed with, for example, GCC:
during the summer, there was plenty of confusion about how GCC should
be installed in order to work properly (it was all spelled out in
detail in the documentation, but presumably not clearly enough since
there was so much confusion).  After easier ways to do the
installation came to the rescue (can you say SLS?), the number of GCC
questions dropped to almost zero.  If we had, as was suggested at the
time, created a newsgroup for GCC, it would be more or less empty now.
This is an important issue when creating newsgroups: the group will be
here to stay, so creating groups based on particular, temporary topics
is not a good idea.

But I guess we'll be discussing this in excruciating detail come June.
:-)

>Please don't kill me if I say something that has been said a lot of times.

You take all the fun of this.  I was already looking forward to one
more mark on the handle of my flame-thrower. :-)

>But the current state of this group isn't bearable any more - 

Depends on the reader, I guess.  I have no problems with the current
volume of the group (the contents, on the other hand, is a different
issue).

>and it WILL get worse.

Hm..., I haven't measured it, but I have a feeling that the volume of
c.o.l actually hasn't increased very much lately.

--
Lars.Wirzenius@helsinki.fi  (finger wirzeniu@klaava.helsinki.fi)
   MS-DOS, you can't live with it, you can live without it.
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux