Is it a newsgroup or a list?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 7 Jun 2015 09:20 pm, random832 at fastmail.us wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 7, 2015, at 05:06, Luca Menegotto wrote:
>> Il 07/06/2015 10:22, Cecil Westerhof ha scritto:
>>  > That only times the function. I explicitly mentioned I want both the
>>  > needed time AND the output.
>>  >
>>  > Sadly the quality of the answers on this list is going down....
>> 
>> First of all, thank God it's a newsgroup, not a list.
> ...
>> --
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> 
> I've always thought of this as a list that is mirrored to a newsgroup,
> not a newsgroup that is mirrored to a list. What is the true nature of
> python-list (and others such as python-ideas)? What is it primarily,
> what was it first, etc?

It's a mailing list mirrored to one official newsgroup, and at least one
unofficial newsgroup (gmane). It's also archived on various websites, plus
Google Groups.

As far as I know, python-list a.k.a. comp.lang.python is the only one of the
Python mailing lists with an official newsgroup mirror.

In *practice*, there's not much difference which comes first. Apart from
some spam, which gets filtered from the mailing list but not the newsgroup,
or vise versa, you can post to the mailing list or the newsgroup and the
message will show up on both.



-- 
Steven