[Mailman-Users] Getting a Subscriber List

[Dave Sherohman]

So much for not getting involved in this...

Roger B.A. Klorese said:
> without
> documentation usable by the target non-developer user the job is not done

While that may be true in the general case, the target audience for Mailman
(or at least the command-line portions of it) is not general non-developer
users.  It is system administrators.

Decent sysadmins are, at the very least, technically competent.  They may not
know much about how to write code, but (in a *nix environment - again, this
is the environment that Mailman seems to be designed for) they can at least
recognize the rough purpose of a script by reading its source.  Thus, they
should know to try calling programs with arguments such as -?, -h, or --help
and, if that fails, be capable of reading and understanding an explanatory
comment block in a script, even if they know nothing about the (programming)
language the script is written in.

I'm not saying that Mailman shouldn't have manpages (I agree that it should).
Nor do I think that it would be bad for it to be fully and comprehensively
documented.  However, not all software is targeted to the same audience and
different audiences require different types and amounts of documentation.

-- 
"Two words: Windows survives." - Craig Mundie, Microsoft senior strategist
"So does syphillis. Good thing we have penicillin." - Matthew Alton
Geek Code 3.1:  GCS d- s+: a- C++ UL++$ P+>+++ L+++>++++ E- W--(++) N+ o+
!K w---$ O M- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t 5++ X+ R++ tv b+ DI++++ D G e* h+ r++ y+