What's to be considered on-topic for Guile mailing lists? (Re: The message chain with an happy ending)

[Maxime Devos]

Op 05-07-2023 om 12:42 schreef Blake Shaw:
> I think the guile mailing list has come to suffer seriously from a 
> policing of what is appropriate for discussion. When I first started 
> getting into guile at the beginning of 2021, the list was more open, 
> active and enjoyable. Since then it has become a ghost town where 
> tumbleweeds blow by in the time that remains between intermittent duals. 
> But strangely there are still lots of people living in the town (ie 
> guile users), they just seldom visit main street these days.
>
> I'm personally interested to hear about what Stefan and other Guilers 
> are up to beyond Guile, insofar as nobody is directing hate or bigotry. 
> But more importantly, I wish that Guile could again become a space that 
> welcomes discourse insofar as that discourse isn't perceived by some as 
> causing harm or stirring irrelevant controversy.

’Being policed for basic on-topicness’ and ‘open and enjoyable’ are not 
mutually exclusive, and the former isn't a negative thing.

I find the ‘ghost town’ analogy a rather bad analogy; I would instead 
say that 'guile-devel' is, say, a research lab (dedicated to Guile 
itself) in an alive research centre (dedicated to Guile in general) -- 
the Guile department isn't really alive, but that's just because of lack 
of applicants and interest in working on Guile itself, not because of a 
bad work environment.

I don't have an issue with increasing the scope of what's considered 
on-topic of the mailing list to also include ‘what are others up to 
beyond Guile’ (changing it from ‘research lab’ to ‘an environment that 
contains a (strict) research lab and (non-strict) hanging-out area’ in 
the analogy).

However, this increase in scope hasn't actually happened yet -- it's 
still named guile-devel (i.e., __development__) -- it needs a name 
change, or some documentation in the manual.

Best regards,
Maxime Devos

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