* Benjamin C. Pierce (bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu) wrote:
> Since the problem is essentially too much of a good thing, it's hard to
> see what could be a complete solution.  But I think there are several
> little steps that can help.  Having a separate caml-announce list is a
> good step, and I hope people get (even more) in the habit of using it to
> let others know about useful stuff.  I also wonder whether someone
> (perhaps Alan Schmitt, who does something similar already?) could try
> posting occasional "minutes" of the discussions on the list, so that
> people like me could check in and see what's been going on without trying
> to read every message.

The 'Caml Weekly News' is supposed to give news of what's happening in
the ocaml world to the people reading the development page of the Linux
Weekly News. As I said previously, the way I select messages is very
subjective. For instance, here are the headers of the one I sent this
morning (it is sent every Tuesday morning, to be included in the lwn of
the following thursday):

1) AIFAD-1.0.2
2) MLdonkey 2.00
3) Operator overloading
4) OCaml-SOAP library : bug fixed
5) ICFP 2002 Programming Contest Write-up

Items 1, 2, and 4 are new software announcement, item 4 is some part of
the operator overloading discussion (which I found interesting), and
item 5 was mandatory since the web page says "O'Caml is the programming
tool of choice for discriminating hackers." ;-)

I'm really open to discussion to what I should include, and how I should
distribute this letter. At the moment I just have an alias file that I
manually update, and archives of the cwn are not online (I could put
them online if considered useful). I'm not sure about sending the cwn to
the list, since I basically quote messages there (and give pointers to
the archives when the discussion gets too long).

As concerns moderation, I'm strongly against, as it really slows down
some debates (or we would need a bunch of moderators in different time
zones ...), and as the number of unwelcomed messages is fairly low.

Alan

-- 
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.
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