Is it a newsgroup or a list?

[Tim Golden]

On 07/06/2015 12:20, 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 both: they're mirrored to each other and I consider both to be 
first class citizens. In strict chronology I believe comp.lang.python 
existed first, but python-list has been around for long enough that the 
distinction now is really quite academic.

I would not be surprised to find that a fair majority of people told off 
on this list for abusing newsgroup etiquette in one way or another not 
only have no idea that this is (also) a newsgroup but don't even know 
what a newsgroup *is*.

They may also not know that it's a mailing list, nor what that is, 
because they're coming via Google Groups -- which uses the Usenet 
gateway -- or through gmane -- which comes in through the mailing list 
-- or some other web mirror.


TJG