Re: c++ strings with gdb??

[Michael Elizabeth Chastain]

Start here:

  http://sources.redhat.com/gdb/mailing-lists/

There are nine mailing lists here.  People at Red Hat administer the
first eight mailing lists (gdb-announce, gdb, gdb-patches, gdb-prs,
gdb-testers, gdb-cvs, src-cvs, gdbadmin).  If you look in the archives
you will see that they are effectively anti-spammed.

The ninth list, bug-gdb, is maintained directly by gnu.org.  As you have
noticed, this list is overrun with spam.  In April 2002 (the last full
month), 827 of the 867 messages are spam.

The admin page for this list is:

  http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gdb

This page lists an admin contact address of:

  address@hidden

I recommend you go there and ask about volunteering.

The Mailman web site is at:

  http://www.list.org

This spam annoys me too.  So I've added an item to the end of my TODO list
to contact address@hidden and volunteer to moderate some lists.

Technically, it's easy to antispam a Gnu Mailman list.  Just set up the
list to hold postings from non-subscribers.  Once or twice a day, an admin
can look at the hold queue and kill all the spam (95% of the postings).
There can be multiple admins.  There is a whitelist of pre-approved
non-subscribers, so if you see a gdb developer making frequent replies to
bug-gdb, but they are not subscribed to bug-gdb, you can add them to the
whitelist.

It's GNU policy that Project GNU does not undertake to help individual
users or reply to bug reports.  A bug report is a user contribution
to help improve the software for future generations.  Users who want
guaranteed responses are encouraged to hire a technical support provider.

Thus, I believe there is no policy issue with holding bug-gdb postings
for approval, which will typically delay them for 6 to 24 hours.  I know
that as a developer, I'd rather receive delayed messages with no spam than
immediate messages along with 20 spams (and that really is the ratio,
20 spams to 1 legitimate message).

There may be other issues, though.  The FSF moves in mysterious ways.

Good luck if you pursue this,

Michael C