[Mailman-Users] Meta: bringing along the newcomers

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Lindsay Haisley writes:

 > Stephen, with all due respect for the work you put into your post, I
 > think it goes a bit overboard in the other direction.  If I can pose a
 > question in 6 or 7 lines of text, do I really need to read a couple of
 > hundred lines of instruction?

It's under 100 lines, of which almost half were cut-and-pasted from
the existing FAQ 1.22.

 > - or dig through a FAQ and write a critique of it - just to get a
 >   simple answer?

Yup, that's exactly the stuff I cut and pasted.

Anyway, you're entirely missing the point.  I don't expect anybody to
read FAQ 1.22 in advance of comitting a faux pas; this particular FAQ
is mostly for pointing to *afterward*.

 > I recently posted a question to this list in about 7 lines
 > inquiring as to what file is the source document in a Mailman
 > Pipermail archive.  I asked on the list precisely _because_ I
 > didn't want to spend the time searching through FAQs and other
 > documentation for a simple answer to a simple question.

Er, that's precisely what FAQs and documentation in general are for,
so I suggest you go read the current version of FAQ 1.22, then.  It
was written for people like you.<wink>

More seriously, you've been around long enough (and have presumably
actually perused the FAQ once or twice) to have a sense of what's
*not* in there.  You're obviously not the audience for FAQ 1.22, and
the question you describe is not one of the ones that Mark should make
a New Year's resolution to stop answering.