Frequently Asked Questions About
The FreeBSD Mailing Lists
Abstract
This is the FAQ for the FreeBSD mailing lists. If you are interested in helping with this project, send
email to the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list. The latest version of this document isalways available from the FreeBSD World Wide Web server. It may also be downloaded as onelarge HTML file with HTTP or as plain text, PostScript, PDF, etc. from the FreeBSD FTP server. Youmay also want to Search the FAQ.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12. Mailing List Etiquette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23. Recurring Topics On The Mailing Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54. What Is A "Bikeshed"? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

1. Introduction
As is usual with FAQs, this document aims to cover the most frequently asked questions concerning
the FreeBSD mailing lists (and of course answer them!). Although originally intended to reduce
bandwidth and avoid the same old questions being asked over and over again, FAQs have become
recognized as valuable information resources.
This document attempts to represent a community consensus, and as such it can never really beauthoritative. However, if you find technical errors within this document, or have suggestions
about items that should be added, please either submit a PR, or email the FreeBSD documentation
project mailing list. Thanks.

1.1. What is the purpose of the FreeBSD mailing lists?
The FreeBSD mailing lists serve as the primary communication channels for the FreeBSD
community, covering many different topic areas and communities of interest.

1.2. Who is the audience for the FreeBSD mailing lists?
This depends on charter of each individual list. Some lists are more oriented to developers; someare more oriented towards the FreeBSD community as a whole. Please see this list for the current
summary.

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Lists are English language, unless stated otherwise.

1.3. Are the FreeBSD mailing lists open for anyone toparticipate?
Again, this depends on charter of each individual list. Please read the charter of a mailing list
before you post to it, and respect it when you post. This will help everyone to have a better
experience with the lists.
If after reading the above lists, you still do not know which mailing list to post a question to, youwill probably want to post to freebsd-questions (but see below, first).
Also note that the mailing lists have traditionally been open to postings from non-subscribers. Thishas been a deliberate choice, to help make joining the FreeBSD community an easier process, and toencourage open sharing of ideas. However, due to past abuse by some individuals, certain lists now
have a policy where postings from non-subscribers must be manually screened to ensure that theyare appropriate.

1.4. How can I subscribe?
You can use the Mlmmj web interface to subscribe to any of the public lists.

1.5. How can I unsubscribe?
You can use the same interface as above; or, you can follow the instructions that are at the bottomof every mailing list message that is sent.
Please do not send unsubscribe messages directly to the public lists themselves. First, this will notaccomplish your goal, and second, it will irritate the existing subscribers, and you will probably get
flamed. This is a classical mistake when using mailing lists; please try to avoid it.

1.6. Are archives available?
Yes. Threaded archives with all e-mails since 1994 are available here. You can also access mailman
archive and mlmmj archive directly.

1.7. Are mailing lists available in a digest format?
Yes. See the Mlmmj web interface.

2. Mailing List Etiquette
Participation in the mailing lists, like participation in any community, requires a common basis forcommunication. Please make only appropriate postings, and follow common rules of etiquette.

22.1. What should I do before I post?
You have already taken the most important step by reading this document. However, if you are newto FreeBSD, you may first need to familiarize yourself with the software, and all the social history
around it, by reading the numerous books and articles that are available. Items of particularinterest include the FreeBSD Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document, the FreeBSD Handbook,and the articles How to get best results from the FreeBSD-questions mailing list, Explaining BSD,
and FreeBSD First Steps.
It is always considered bad form to ask a question that is already answered in the above
documents. This is not because the volunteers who work on this project are particularly meanpeople, but after a certain number of times answering the same questions over and over again,
frustration begins to set in. This is particularly true if there is an existing answer to the questionthat is already available. Always keep in mind that almost all of the work done on FreeBSD is done
by volunteers, and that we are only human.

2.2. What constitutes an inappropriate posting?
• Postings must be in accordance with the charter of the mailing list.
• Personal attacks are discouraged. As good net-citizens, we should try to hold ourselves to highstandards of behavior.
• Spam is not allowed, ever. The mailing lists are actively processed to ban offenders to this rule.

2.3. What is considered proper etiquette when posting
to the mailing lists?
• Please wrap lines at 75 characters, since not everyone uses fancy GUI mail reading programs.
• Please respect the fact that bandwidth is not infinite. Not everyone reads email through highspeed connections, so if your posting involves something like the content of config.log or an
extensive stack trace, please consider putting that information up on a website somewhere andjust provide a URL to it. Remember, too, that these postings will be archived indefinitely, sohuge postings will simply inflate the size of the archives long after their purpose has expired.
• Format your message so that it is legible, and PLEASE DO NOT SHOUT!!!!!. Do not underestimate
the effect that a poorly formatted mail message has, and not just on the FreeBSD mailing lists.
Your mail message is all that people see of you, and if it is poorly formatted, badly spelled, full oferrors, and/or has lots of exclamation points, it will give people a poor impression of you.
• Please use an appropriate human language for a particular mailing list. Many non-English
mailing lists are available.
For the ones that are not, we do appreciate that many people do not speak English as their firstlanguage, and we try to make allowances for that. It is considered particularly poor form tocriticize non-native speakers for spelling or grammatical errors. FreeBSD has an excellent trackrecord in this regard; please, help us to uphold that tradition.
• Please use a standards-compliant Mail User Agent (MUA). A lot of badly formatted messages

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come from bad mailers or badly configured mailers. The following mailers are known to sendout badly formatted messages without you finding out about them:◦ exmh◦ Microsoft® Exchange◦ Microsoft® Outlook®
Try not to use MIME: a lot of people use mailers which do not get on very well with MIME.
• Make sure your time and time zone are set correctly. This may seem a little silly, since yourmessage still gets there, but many of the people on these mailing lists get several hundred
messages a day. They frequently sort the incoming messages by subject and by date, and if yourmessage does not come before the first answer, they may assume that they missed it and not
bother to look.
• A lot of the information you need to supply is the output of programs, such as dmesg(8), orconsole messages, which usually appear in /var/log/messages. Do not try to copy thisinformation by typing it in again; not only it is a real pain, but you are bound to make a mistake.
To send log file contents, either make a copy of the file and use an editor to trim the information
to what is relevant, or cut and paste into your message. For the output of programs like dmesg,
redirect the output to a file and include that. For example,% dmesg > /tmp/dmesg.out
This redirects the information to the file /tmp/dmesg.out.
• When using cut-and-paste, please be aware that some such operations badly mangle theirmessages. This is of particular concern when posting contents of Makefiles, where tab is asignificant character. This is a very common, and very annoying, problem with submissions tothe Problem Reports database. Makefiles with tabs changed to either spaces, or the annoying =3B
escape sequence, create a great deal of aggravation for committers.

2.4. What are the special etiquette consideration when
replying to an existing posting on the mailing lists?
• Please include relevant text from the original message. Trim it to the minimum, but do not
overdo it. It should still be possible for somebody who did not read the original message tounderstand what you are talking about.
This is especially important for postings of the type "yes, I see this too", where the initial posting
was dozens or hundreds of lines.
• Use some technique to identify which text came from the original message, and which text you
add. A common convention is to prepend “>” to the original message. Leaving white space after
the “>” and leaving empty lines between your text and the original text both make the result
more readable.
• Please ensure that the attributions of the text you are quoting is correct. People can become4

offended if you attribute words to them that they themselves did not write.
• Please do not top post. By this, we mean that if you are replying to a message, please put yourreplies after the text that you copy in your reply.
◦ A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
◦ Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
(Thanks to Randy Bush for the joke.)

3. Recurring Topics On The Mailing Lists
Participation in the mailing lists, like participation in any community, requires a common basis forcommunication. Many of the mailing lists presuppose a knowledge of the Project’s history. In
particular, there are certain topics that seem to regularly occur to newcomers to the community. Itis the responsibility of each poster to ensure that their postings do not fall into one of thesecategories. By doing so, you will help the mailing lists to stay on-topic, and probably save yourself
being flamed in the process.
The best method to avoid this is to familiarize yourself with the mailing list archives, to help
yourself understand the background of what has gone before. In this, the mailing list searchinterface is invaluable. (If that method does not yield useful results, please supplement it with asearch with your favorite major search engine).
By familiarizing yourself with the archives, not only will you learn what topics have been discussed
before, but also how discussion tends to proceed on that list, who the participants are, and who thetarget audience is. These are always good things to know before you post to any mailing list, not justa FreeBSD mailing list.
There is no doubt that the archives are quite extensive, and some questions recur more often thanothers, sometimes as followups where the subject line no longer accurately reflects the newcontent. Nevertheless, the burden is on you, the poster, to do your homework to help avoid theserecurring topics.

4. What Is A "Bikeshed"?
Literally, a bikeshed is a small outdoor shelter into which one may store one’s two-wheeled form oftransportation. However, in FreeBSD parlance, the term refers to topics that are simple enough that(nearly) anyone can offer an opinion about, and often (nearly) everyone does. The genesis of thisterm is explained in more detail in this document. You simply must have a working knowledge ofthis concept before posting to any FreeBSD mailing list.
More generally, a bikeshed is a topic that will tend to generate immediate meta-discussions andflames if you have not read up on their history.
Please help us to keep the mailing lists as useful for as many people as possible by avoiding
bikesheds whenever you can. Thanks.

55. Acknowledgments
Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>
Original author of most of the material on mailing list etiquette, taken from the article on How toget best results from the FreeBSD-questions mailing list.
Mark Linimon <linimon@FreeBSD.org>
Creation of the rough draft of this FAQ.

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