[Python-Dev] Weekly posting of FAQ index?

Skip Montanaro skip@mojam.com (Skip Montanaro)
Thu, 10 Feb 2000 17:07:04 -0600


Apologies in advance. This isn't really the right place to bring this up,
but I didn't want to open up discussion to the entire c.l.py without a
little feedback first.  I volunteer to take this off-list (maybe there's a
more appropriate list already set up meta-sig?) and come back with a
recommendation to the assembled masses here or elsewhere.

Many newsgroups post FAQs on a regular basis.  I wonder if it wouldn't be
such a bad idea to try and figure out how to do that with the Python FAQ.  A 
few issues come to mind:

    1. Availability in plain text.  Is it?  I only every use the FAQ wizard
       any more, so I don't know.

    2. How to keep it from percolating to the mailing list?  I doubt people
       are going to want weekly or monthly mailings of the form "Python FAQ
       part 1/13" on a regular basis.  I suspect the mail/news gateway could 
       be trained to recognize this special message, perhaps if it was
       cross-posted to one other special newsgroup (misc.answers or whatever 
       catches all the FAQs in the known universe).

    3. Maybe a completely different form is needed for periodic posting - a
       Mini-FAQ - which answers the most egregious questions like "why
       whitespace indentation?" and "how do I run this thing I just
       downloaded?", then refers to the real FAQ URL for everything else.

Comments?

Skip Montanaro | http://www.mojam.com/
skip@mojam.com | http://www.musi-cal.com/
"Languages that change by catering to the tastes of non-users tend not to do
so well." - Doug Landauer