National mailinglists - why isn't it there yet?

[Julian Stacey]

> I think that the question dropped by Edw was more of why this service
> wasn't offered from the FreeBSD mailman infrastructure. I think
> that every country and state  has its own mailman/majordomo/ezmlm/whatever
> features, but none are ran centrally.
> 
> Edwin

Local language lists best left in national domain spaces IMO,
so the admin of national traffic problems is resolved with least effort.

+ also a uniform international naming convention Might be nice,
   but a name like
	questions at your-country.freebsd.org
   or
	questions-your-country at freebsd.org
   might not be acceptable for some countries where eg "questions"
   might mean something inappropriate, or need a char set.

I think it unlikely & undesirable we'll see centrally run lists.

The extra work for the central mailman-owner:
   I guess mailman-owner at freebsd.org is happy/wise to avoid the
   nightmare of local languages & character sets & leave it to
   locals within each delegated your-country.freebsd.org DNS name space.

   Imagine the extra work if less multi lingually skilled start
   dumping extra mail list problems on the international administrators,
   some in Spanish, French, German, Chinese, etc &/or in worse than
   than normal international English.

   Would volunteer want extra unpaid work sorting it ?  Apart from
   bounces, warnings etc, even just getting eg List description
   updates in many national font sets would be a pain.  Better if
   the work went direct to a fellow national who could read it
   easily.

What benefit/ trying to centrally administer foreign lists ?
   Example: A Swiss German told me in '85 that German programmers
   who could read English tended to be better programmers than
   fellow Germans who struggled in English. Since then PCs have
   become more pervasive, & there'll be more computer books in more
   local languages, but on average, the concept likely tends to be
   true for most language groups: Those who've known Unix longest,
   probably are more skilled, & more used to reading Unix manuals
   & lists in English, & more likely to be using international list
   anyway (& if they're on local lists at all, mostly to help their
   less skilled nationals).

   There'll be  a few exceptions to prove the rule, eg laptop code
   first developed on Japanese hosted FreeBSD lists.  But over all,
   I guess FreeBSD can still best expect to benefit from more diffs
   etc posted by more skilled users on the international
   current at freebsd.org etc than simple end user non contributor
   traffic on questions at your-local-country.freebsd.org traffic

Examples of URLs to local language mail lists:
	http://www.de.freebsd.org/community/mailinglists.html
	http://www.fr.freebsd.org/community/mailinglists.html
	http://www.kr.freebsd.org/support.shtml#mailing-list
	http://www.freebsd.de/mailinglists.html	points to domo@
	majordomo at nl.FreeBSD.org.
Yes, not all admins use same list tools, so not orthogonal naming.

Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey: BSDUnixLinux C Prog Admin SysEng Consult Munich www.berklix.com
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