Why GRASSP?

[Rob Knauerhase]

In an E-mail message, Greg Colello said:
>How many people out there subscribe to GRASSP but do not subscribe to  
>GRASSU. How many people only subscribe to just one of them? If not  
>very many, I suggest the elimination of GRASSP. I'm getting tired of  
>receiving two copies of the same email (one to GRASSP and one to  
>GRASSU). I have to compare the two messages to see if indeed they are  
>the same (as their identical title and authorship implies). Besides  
>GRASSP has a very low volume. Having only one hopper, would allow the  
>receiver to decide whether their interested in a certain type of  
>question not the sender.

I can sympathize with people who get over-loaded with mailing-list mail.
However, I think that the problem of duplicate postings to the lists is more
one of policy than mechanism.  The original (intended) topics for the lists
were very separate; indeed, the whole reason for having two lists was so that
people would get mail that interested them and not other cruft.

As of today, there are 344 people on the Users' list, and 202 on the
Programmers' list.  The intersection of these two is 156; i.e. there are
156 people who are on both lists.  This is more or less what I had expected --
that there would be lots of people interested in application issues, fewer
interested in programming issues, with most people who join the Programmers'
list also joining the Users' list to keep up with what happens there.

So, there does appear to be a significant fraction of people who are only
interested in one of the lists.  Not everyone, certainly, but many.

What I'd recommend is this:

1: A firmer, clearer policy statement on our (OGI's) part.  It's impossible
to foresee all issues that might come up, but perhaps we can make clearer the
delineation of what material is appropriate for each list.
    N.B. that this will take co-operation on the part of everyone out there,
too -- because we do not officially monitor the content of messages, there is
really no way to enforce what gets mailed where.

2: Better mailreaders on the receiving end.  There are several really good
tools out there (for free) which replace /bin/mail with better interfaces.  I
recommend Elm, which is available by FTP from wuarchive.wustl.edu in
/packages/elm-2.3/* .  It not only has a better (IMHO) interface for
mailreading, but comes with a "filter" program and other accessories that
help deal with E-mail.  Elm compiles on just about any Unix platform and
comes with a configuration script that makes it compilable by just about
anyone (i.e. you don't have to be a kernel-hacker to make it go).
    There is also "mh", to which I can provide a pointer if people care.

If people really feel strongly about merging the lists, we can certainly
consider it.  However, my opinion is to give the above two points a try first
and see if that doesn't help cut down on some of the duplication.

Rob