About this list
Roy T. Fielding (fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu)
Sat, 08 Nov 1997 00:12:38 -0800
When I started this project three and a half years ago, the mailing
list was intended for both developers of the library and developers
of applications that use the library (our users). There is very little
traffic on this list compared to others, helped somewhat by the huge
regular expression that is currently filtering out sp*m.
The "lame book or website" that is pointing to this list is Tom's
old List of Perl Lists on www.perl.com --- a little time spent
improving that description would cut the foolish questions (and
bogus admin requests) in half. When we do get foolish questions,
it is inappropriate to respond to them on the mailing list itself.
Now that perl.com is connected to the net with something better than
a tin can and string, it would be nice to move the whole shebang there.
However, there is a lot more to maintaining a mailing list than just
delivering mail. It would require mailing list software that can
handle over 600 international subscribers and a real person monitoring
the request traffic AND the mailing list itself. When you get that
person and set up that software and can demonstrate that it all works,
then we can talk about moving the mailing list. Personally I would
welcome it, since I have no replacement here at UCI and fully intend
to graduate within a year.
As for collaborative development, the model we came up with in the
Apache Group works much better. However, it works largely because
we have a machine on which all the core developers have an account,
and a real person (Brian Behlendorf) who spends a good deal of time
maintaining the system and mailing lists. I haven't seen anyone
on libwww-perl volunteer for that kind of work (yet).
...Roy T. Fielding
Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3425 fax:+1(714)824-1715
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/