Well, this list is like a group of friends...something like Cheers. When you come in they scream your name and bring you into the fold. It's always been like this. There is a lot of technical talk (shop talk), personal talk, arguements..etc. It's a very community list, not just a help list. It's been like this since the day I joined this list almost 3.5 years ago. It probably won't be changing anytime soon because if it did change then it would loose it's charm and the ability to be such a great place to pose questions. When your into this list and talking about SuSE Linux you learn a lot, but you do put up with something things. It's a bit like asking Grandpa for advice...you have to hear the story first before you get the info your looking for...and I personally wouldn't change a thing. It's just how is. It's why we use procmail ;) Fond Regards, * Terence McCarthy (saki@cwcom.net) [010513 09:33]: ->On Sunday 13 May 2001 13:40, Alan Lenton wrote: ->> All, ->> ->> It would be nice if we could stick to subject matter for this list. At the ->> best of time it is a high traffic list. This sort of thing makes it ->> impossible. ->> ->> This list is, IMHO one of the very best sites available for Linux technical ->> support, and it has some of the very best people on it helping out. There ->> are plenty of lists out there for discussing other matters. Please use ->> them, and remember that it's not necessary to have the last word, you can ->> just leave the matter. ->> ->> Too much extranious matter on the list will destroy its usefulness to the ->> Linux community and will cause potential new Linux users who are unable to ->> get assistance to be lost. ->> ->> alan -> ->Amen. -- Ben Rosenberg mailto:ben@whack.org ----- If two men agree on everything, you can be sure that only one of them is doing the thinking.

I agree completely, I have been subscribed to this list since version 5.3... and the list has always maintained it community like spirit.IMO this is another great advantage of SuSE... the tolerance of people discussing what they want, it lends itself to the close knit community without having to be worried about getting flamed to death because someone asks an obivious question. (As I've heard takes place on other linux lists) I really dont think this is a high traffice list, it does about 100 messages a day and for the most part they are usually informative to some degree (depending on where one is at, at the time). I'd say it all comes down to free speach, everyone here has the rite to post what they want, and usually the bs posts just get ignored, while the core discussions carry on. On a side note, I will say one thing that is a small problem is exact duplicate messages. I suspect this due to sending the mail with kmail. It might help if people check their mouse setting in K. The single click sometimes is too fast and I guess the message gets fired off twice. You can see this with messages sent by the same person at exactly the same time. even still, I can deal with that have fun rob Ben Rosenberg wrote:

Well, this list is like a group of friends...something like Cheers. When you come in they scream your name and bring you into the fold. It's always been like this. There is a lot of technical talk (shop talk), personal talk, arguements..etc. It's a very community list, not just a help list. It's been like this since the day I joined this list almost 3.5 years ago. It probably won't be changing anytime soon because if it did change then it would loose it's charm and the ability to be such a great place to pose questions. When your into this list and talking about SuSE Linux you learn a lot, but you do put up with something things. It's a bit like asking Grandpa for advice...you have to hear the story first before you get the info your looking for...and I personally wouldn't change a thing. It's just how is. It's why we use procmail ;)

Derek Fountain wrote:

...

sigh... the thing is, *I* have a degree in Computer Science, plus 10 years experience in working in programming with sh, C and Java and Unix computer system administration - all on various platforms of Unix. I have YET to see any command line commands that can not be duplicated with a well written text menu or GUI.

I have yet to see a decent text or GUI mechanism for creating shell pipelines - UNIX or Windows. Regular expressions are another one. Writing GUIs for simple commands isn't that difficult. Converting the power of the UNIX shell into a GUI is not yet possible, and maybe never will be. I would suggest that anyone who thinks it's just a case of arranging enough buttons doesn't really know the power of the shell interface.

You can suggest what you like. NeXT and AIX (which is from the company you apparently work for) both have had decent sysadmin tools (not great, maybe but nice none the less) long before they were thought of in Linux. I loved that you could see the underlying commands that would be run when you used AIX's system administration tool (I can't recall its name at the moment). This made it useful for those who began system administration in another system to pick up the new flavor easily and be able to write scripts that were targeted to other needs. Anyone who thinks shell commands can't be well scripted has not seen the powerful and useful scripts available. I've written some and seen many others. This does not mean that such a system would be fast. But I've seen people be thrilled with the availability of a front-end and suffer through some slowness rather than have to figure out the underlying system. CVS is an example. As for GUI's, its much more than a few buttons, but it's do-able. Any GUI would of course by much more useful and powerful if the underlying tools were written in such a way as to be able to link them in and be able to do exception handling rather than having to be concerned with system()-, or pout()-type calls and catching text or an exit code from the system, but they are do-able none the less. Don't get me wrong, I love the commandline for the fact that I *CAN* write scripts I think are useful to me. But I don't want to do that for trivial things - I think that should be provided by the system itself. And without GUId front-ends (as well as useful tools and fun games), the mass market will remain uninterested in linux.