D. D. Brierton wrote:
Point well taken... A word of caution never hurts... And I see your point about the absense of Red Hat personnel on the list, however I also think that the whole point of Fedora was to be taken care by the community it could generate... Red Hat is still a great part of the distro and the communtiy and I don't think that will ever change (and I certainly hope it won't!!), but this also allows us, the users to experiment and take care of this huge baby the whole Fedora project is, either by supplyin users in trouble with support and answers to their inquiries even if they're the most basic ones... I myself try as hard as I can to avoid giving a freaking RTFM answer... Why? Because I know what does it feel like to be struck by such an answer as a newbie... However I try to also encourage study and investigation upon answering (I cannot always attain this, but I try)... And many more do their best too...I hope you won't mind if I don't reply in detail to your thoughtful and well-written reply. I don't want this to turn into a thread which exemplifies all the things I was decrying in my original posting. But I agree with much of what you say: yes, the passions and the volume with which they are expressed on this list is a sign of the health and vigour of the Fedora community; but at the same time it is also a danger for it. Many voices shouting loudly about nothing terribly important is not productive. Remember that at this moment, with CVS (or is it SVN now?) access still not opened up, these mailing lists are pretty much what constitutes the Fedora community. And if these flame wars continue then I think that community might dissipate horribly -- after all, how many Red Hat engineers post here nowadays? I think that there is a danger that people will leave this mailing list for good if it continues like it is, and that will be a bad thing for everyone. That was the only point I was trying to make.
Best, Darren
The dynamic nature of the list is what is making it quite hard to keep up with, a less dynamic means of communication (such as official community forums) are, in my opinon more suited to the amount of volume this list gets... being less dynamic means less overflow, you can go through threads at much more slow pace and it will even be a better way to encourage growth, or so I see it.
