On Wed, Dec 15, 1999 at 10:54:17PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> May I ask that everyone stop responding to Mr. Woods? Simply because
> he's got boundless energy to post inane replies is no reason for us to
> follow him down the vortex.

Frankly, no. You may not ask. Without ranting too much, the Internet
is very anti-censorship.

If you choose not to reply, that's your business. 
If you choose to killfile some person or thread, that's your business.
(I still maintain my opinion that that is a way of avoiding an
	issue though.)

A thread only stays alive as long as (at least) two people are going
back and forth. If there was nothing worth discussing, then no one
would reply. (And, I've not often seen people follow up their own
posts in a non-sensical way very often.)

A more valuable approach (IMHO) is to figure out a true conclusion
to the issue.

For example, in the repository-copy issue, I posted a message
explaining the situation as best as I understood it. There was 
information I didn't have, and it sounds like the copy scripts
being used handle the issues as best as possible, and that
leaves Greg (Woods') opinion, as a "technological choice"
(Greg Hudson) that NetBSD didn't pick. That's fine.

I don't mind trying to learn the subject and posting an example,
it order to clarify the situation, and let someone who knows
clean it up, but why didn't someone who knows, early in the
thread reply to Greg (Woods) and say "We've made a choice to
do it this way. We've made the best effort we can to create
these scripts which we use, because they do the 'right thing'."
And even better, "Here are the scripts, if you can give a 
specific example of something that could be done better, please
do."

I try to tell people when I'm wearing my 'advocacy' hat that
the NetBSD mailing-lists have a significant advantage over other
Open Source projects I've looked in on. Part of that is in being
friendly, and receptive, trying to get straight to the point,
and resolving conflicts (personal, not CVS ;-) as best we can.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
All this stuff in twice the space would only look half as bad!
					      - me