issues related to list change

[Gregor Kiczales <gregor@parc.xerox.com>]

So far, two issues have come up in regard to the proposal to move the
discussion currently on CommonLoops to a usenet bboard.  Let me try and
address these:

 1) Many people don't read usenet bboards.  Why not move the mailing
    list to MCC with the rest of the Common-Lisp-xxx mailing lists.

    I certainly understand this position.  Not long ago I didn't read
    usenet bboards.  But, there are a couple of issues here.  It is a
    sad but true fact that maintaining a large mailing list is a lot
    of work, and even when well done the reliability is not what one
    would like.

    Moreover, there are a lot more people who can reliably read usenet
    news than can get email.  Another way of saying this is that the
    usenet bboards seem to be where the masses are.  If we really want
    to have a medium to communicate with a lot of users, that seems to
    be the place to go.

    One possibility is to do a gatewayed bboard where everything sent
    to the bboard goes to a mailing list and vice versa.  Then the
    mailing list could be much smaller, perhaps it would only be for
    backwards compatibility for some of the people who don't want to
    read bboards.  I will explore this.

  2) Should we use comp.lang.lisp?

     My opinion is that we shouldn't.  I believe that CLOS deserves its
     own discussion forum.  As for the specific name comp.object.clos,
     my idea was that most of the people in the Lisp community know that
     CLOS is an OO system for Common Lisp.  Many of the people in the
     (very fast growing) OO community don't know about CLOS.  I wanted
     to make CLOS more known to them.