lauren@RAND-UNIX.ARPA (12/29/84)
Before we do too much more flaming (over my messages or any others), I have a question. What do we consider the established purpose of this list to be? Is it to discuss "political" issues, technical issues, or both? For a long time, I thought this was a technical group, to discuss programs, drivers, bugs, and such. Lately, it seems to be becoming much more a political forum. I'm not complaining, but is this really what this list should be used for? I'm afraid that a lot of wizards are starting to drop off the list since they don't have the time nor the inclination to handle all the non-technical messages in this group. Some people are amazingly inundated with mail... Perhaps the less technical comments (including my own) should be directed to info-unix.... --Lauren--
gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (12/29/84)
> ... What do we consider the established purpose of > this list to be? Is it to discuss "political" issues, technical issues, > or both? Clearly it was intended for "technical issues". However, people are posting beginner questions here instead of info-unix, and many of the issues turn out to be at least partly political after all. Does anyone have any good idea how to restrict unix-wizards topics? I know that a moderated newsgroup has been proposed, but many people don't like that either..
jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen) (12/30/84)
> ... What do we consider the established purpose of > this list to be? Is it to discuss "political" issues, technical issues, > or both? I think that you can't avoid political (or, probably better, phylosophical) issues. If I would ask how to integrate support for RSX-11 file systems in the kernel, I can be sure that 99.9% of the discussion would center around the fact that it is *wrong* to do this, on historical, phylosophical, ethical, moral and other grounds. I think that this is right, too. Simple things like bug fixes, etc. are handled in net.bugs.*, and this group can have a much vaguer type of traffic. Of course, discussing the sales policy of ATT isn't one of the items this group was created for, but the amount of traffic on it seems to indicate that there is a fair amount of interest in it among the unix-wizard readers. I think that splitting the group into a pure technical and a more phylosophical group is undesirable, for the reason stated above, being that technical discussions tend to become phylosophical after a while. -- Jack Jansen, {seismo|philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jack or ...!vu44!htsa!jack If *this* is my opinion, I wasn't sober at the time.
gam@amdahl.UUCP (Gordon A. Moffett) (12/31/84)
> > ... What do we consider the established purpose of > > this list to be? Is it to discuss "political" issues, technical issues, > > or both? > I think that you can't avoid political (or, probably better, > phylosophical) issues. It depends on which phylum is being discussed. (.... couldn't resist). -- Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,sun}!amdahl!gam 37 22'50" N / 121 59'12" W [ This is just me talking. ]