Re: [Caml-list] beginners or not (Was: build problem with 3.12.0; no ocamlrun in /usr/local/bin)

[Philippe Wang <mail@philippewang.info>]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 2:35 PM, Gabriel Scherer
<gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
> What I don't like with the current beginners list is that it is a yahoo
> list. This means yet another painful "create an account" process to
> subscribe, useless stuff added at the end of emails, and general an
> unnecessary interface clutter added on top of an otherwise simple and
> efficient communication tool.

Ha! :D
I was looking for that mailing list at INRIA, so I had no chance of finding it!
Well, I gave up in less than 1 minute, so I didn't waste too much time.
It feels a bit like "beginners are not worth having a mailing list @INRIA". :-(

> Philippe, what do you mean by "hack with a tiny community", do you have
> example of discussions that would be pertinent there? Why would it be
> harmful to have them in the standard mailing list?

I believe that discussions about types that less than 1% of all ocaml
programmers understand, recursive functors (for these it must be even
worse), GC tweaking, etc. is "hacking".
I don't think it's harmful to have such discussions in the standard
mailing list.
But I think it's harmful that the standard mailing list gives priority
to such discussions rather than to beginners, even if I kind of prefer
the current situation for practical reasons.

However, I understand that some people don't want to have too many
beginners questions in their mailbox.
But it kind of also reflects that our community is not really willing
to grow (am I wrong? I hope so.).

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 3:04 PM, Christophe Raffalli
<christophe.raffalli@univ-savoie.fr> wrote:
> May be one can have one mailing list with two addresses and a subject with
> [Caml-list] or [Caml-list-beginners] So people that really don't want to see one
> of the two kinds of traffic can filter ...

I believe that would be good.


Cheers,
Philippe Wang