change to mailing list format

[Gregor Kiczales <gregor@parc.xerox.com>, kiuchi.pa@arisia.Xerox.COM]

Many people suggested that it would be better to form a new usenet
newsgroup and also keep a mailing list.  Then, the two could be
gatewayed --- people who like usenet could read it there, people who
like email could keep getting email.  We have checked out what it would
take to do this, and it seems pretty straightforward.  So, we would like
to proceed with this plan.

The first step is to convince the usenet community that it makes sense
to form a new newsgroup for us.  I just posted a call for discussion of
a new newsgroup to news.announce.newgroups, comp.lang.lisp and
comp.object.  It would be great if those of you who do read usenet, and
who would like to see a usenet newsgroup version of this mailing list
could support this action in the discussion there.  In a couple of
weeks, there will be an actual vote in the usenet forum, we will let you
know when that happens.

Following is the text of the message that we sent to propose the new
newsgroup.

Gregor
Yasuhiko

--------

We propose forming a new usenet newsgroup called comp.object.clos.  This
would be an unmoderated forum for discussion of the Common Lisp Object
System (CLOS) object-oriented programming language.  Topics appropriate for
disucssion would include: programming techniques, implementation
techniques, comments about existing implementations, extensions to the
language, relation to other object-oriented programming languages,
educational materials etc.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with CLOS, it is part of the
emerging ANSI standard for Common Lisp.  At present, there at least 10 CLOS
implementations in the market or under development.

The formation of this newsgroup is part of a two step process of
reorganizing the existing CommonLoops@Xerox.com mailing list.  Currently,
this mailing list is the largest CLOS users mailing list, we estimate that
over eight hundred people receive it as email.  In the first step, this
mailing list will be moved and renamed to CLOS@MCC.COM.  The second step,
pending approval of the usenet community, is to create the new newsgroup
and gateway it with this mailing list.

This new gatewayed format will allow many of the people who currently have
technical trouble reading the mailing list to get access to it.  In
addition, we beileve that the nature of the discussion is such that many
people would prefer to receive it as a newsgroup.  We estimate that several
hundred of the people who currently receive the mailing list as email will
immediately switch to reading it as a usenet newsgroup.