On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Jacques Garrigue wrote:
> > Instead of creating a new one, the more imperialistically minded among us
> > might choose to seize power over there...
> 
> Well, the problem is that comp.lang.ml is a moderated newsgroup, and
> that it is directly tied to the SML mailing list. I see no point in
> changing that.

I was only joking ;-)

But in any case: traffic is really low there. I could imagine that
it would be beneficial for the ML-communities not to split up too
much. People look for newsgroups with high traffic, because this improves
the chance of discussing a topic of their interest.

Additionally, people would see that there are several ML-flavours around,
in other terms: the general style of ML is obviously a reasonable one
to adopt/learn.

A beginner will probably find out more easily about advantages and
drawbacks of the specific flavours and implementations if he has a
newsgroup where both sides can argue.

Although a separate newsgroup for Caml would still have a chance of
thriving, some "cultural" intermixture might lead to fruitful (and
hopefully flameless ;) discussions.

Pierre's proposal to still have a list for implementation specific
suggestions seems reasonable. One could cross-post messages from the
maintainers to the newsgroup.

> Also I'm not sure that people who don't like newsgroups would really
> enjoy reading such a non-moderated caml-list, with the flame-wars and
> spam one can expect.

Mailing lists, too, can contain flame wars - but here you cannot "escape"
so easily, because it clutters your mailbox.

> I know it's always hard to distinguish, but for me news and mailing
> lists are complementary, and I would prefer to have mailing lists
> directly pour in my inbox, rather than have to discriminate them to
> avoid overflow.

I personally can live with both alternatives. The question is whether
Pierre wants to become a full-time list moderator or prefers to do
some research...

Best regards,
Markus Mottl

-- 
Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl