Fedora Users — Re: ATTN SELF-STYLED LIST POLICE (was RE: Mr. Day)

James Wilkinson wrote:

MJang wrote:

This sort of begs the question - of the people who use text email
readers, how many are older, more experienced Linux users? (in other
words, if the rest of us bent a bit to accommodate them, perhaps they
would be more motivated to provide better answers). It sounds like at
least a few are stuck with text email readers on their systems.

Well, I've got Maildir folders, so this sort of question isn't too
difficult to answer. The November statistics showed versions of Mutt and
Pine being used: these were the only text-mode mailers in the top 25.

ls | xargs egrep '^From: .*@redhat\.com' | grep -v fedora-list-bounces | wc -l

gives 119 messages.

ls | xargs egrep '^From: .*@redhat\.com' | grep -v fedora-list-bounces | cut -d: -f1-2 | xargs grep 'User-Agent: Mutt' | wc -l

gives 74 messages. 

So about three-fifths of responses from Red Hat employees are sent using
Mutt.

I am generally a fairly libertarian type of guy, so I figured that maybe, just maybe, with a bunch of computer *scientists* and hackers, that real live numbers might be worth keeping in mind, just to keep a reality check on the "discussion".

I received over 116 messages on this list since I went to bed last night. You are reporting that, in the entire month of November, Red Hat employees total number of responses was *119*, with a grand total of *74* coming from text only mailers. So, if we project out over the month of November, that is roughly 200 messages a day * 30 days .... That would be 74 messages out of 6,000. In other words 1%. For the sake of debate, let's assume that every response from a Red Hat employee is worth 10 times that of every other responder on the list.

Wow, that gets us all the way up to 10%.

How about other perspective. Bandwidth and disk space. Let's see. The entire archive for November was 14 MBytes. Let's assume half of that was due to HTML messages. 7 MBytes / month. Oh my goodness! That is almost as much 1/3 of the Swedish i18n of KDE. Geez, this suggests that one person, updating once a month, consumes 10 times more bandwidth and disk space then this entire mailing list combined.

-- 
A. Rick Anderson