From: MARSHALL K. <Kei...@to...> - 2004-06-23 09:31:56
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> Please vote on the following issue. All subscribers to mingw-users who > are interested are encouraged to vote. > > Presently, announcements about MinGW project software are acceptable. > Announcements not of a technical nature, that are unrelated MinGW, and > uninteresting to MinGW developers are definitely unacceptable. The > issue is whether announcements that are not about MinGW software, but > may be of interest to developers using MinGW, should be permitted. > > Should advertisements that are unrelated to MinGW software, yet of > interest to some developers who use MinGW, be permitted on the > mingw-users list? Just to add my two pennyworth ... Can we please make a distinction between advertising and announcements? Advertising, as I understand any reasonable definition of it, in the context of an e-mailing list, implies persistent and repeated posting of identical, or similar, attention grabbing, notifications of the form: Hey, I've created this cool software package -- you really *must* take a look at it! whereas, an announcement is a *once only* posting, such as: I've created/ported xyz software package, which does such and such; if you are interested, you can find out more at some.web.site The important distinction is that advertising is PERSISTENT and REPEATED, whereas an announcement is ONCE ONLY! Now, I am strongly opposed to allowing *advertisements* on *any* mailing list to which I subscribe; however, I do favour allowing *announcements*, provided the content is *relevant* to the context of the list. Obviously, any package which is distributed from the MinGW site is relevant for the MinGW-users list, but IMHO there are other packages which should also be considered relevant. Here's an example: About nine months ago, I was looking for an implementation of troff, which I could use under Win2K. Since I also use GNU/Linux, I tried to get GNU Troff (groff) built, using MinGW. Unfortunately, the version available at the time (1.18.1) would not compile without considerable porting effort. I found a binary port of groff on Sourceforge's GnuWin32 project pages, but it was incomplete, and didn't quite fit my requirements. So, I went back to the original source, modified it to make it work, and contributed my effort back to the groff project. The result is that the official GNU release of groff-1.19.1 now builds out of the box with MinGW. I felt that this was worthy of a one time announcement to MinGW-users; I would not classify this announcement as an advertisement -- its intent was merely to inform MinGW-users that GNU Troff, should they be interested, is now available for download from the official GNU Troff ftp site, and that it should build cleanly using MinGW. I do not suggest that the package should be distributed from the MinGW site, since it is already freely available elsewhere, yet I *do* consider the information that this other Open Source package is now compatible with MinGW to be relevant to MinGW-users. Similarly, I also consider Wu Yongwei's *announcement* of his package of tools, which sparked off this discussion, to be relevant, since it may be useful to other MinGW users. So, to summarise, I am in favour of ONE TIME announcements of this type; I am strongly opposed to allowing advertisements. Provided contributors adhere to the ONE TIME rule, and their announcement does have some relevance, in a MinGW context, I think that is ok. However, if an announcement is repeated, then it becomes an advertisement, and is not welcome. Best regards, Keith. P.S. In my effort to port groff, I was assisted immensely by other members of the MinGW-users community, who were kind enough to answer my questions, and offer advice -- to them, I am eternally grateful. |