       Frequently Asked Questions About The FreeBSD Mailing Lists

  The FreeBSD Documentation Project

   Copyright (c) 2004, 2005 The FreeBSD Documentation Project

   $FreeBSD:
   doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/mailing-list-faq/article.sgml,v 1.7
   2005/10/26 12:14:47 keramida Exp $

   This is the FAQ for the FreeBSD mailing lists. If you are
   interested in helping with this project, send email to the FreeBSD
   documentation project mailing list. The latest version of this
   document is always available from the FreeBSD World Wide Web
   server. It may also be downloaded as one large HTML file with HTTP
   or as plain text, PostScript, PDF, etc. from the FreeBSD FTP
   server. You may also want to Search the FAQ.

     --------------------------------------------------------------

1 Introduction

   As is usual with FAQs, this document aims to cover the most
   frequently asked questions concerning the FreeBSD mailing lists
   (and of course answer them!). Although originally intended to
   reduce bandwidth and avoid the same old questions being asked over
   and over again, FAQs have become recognized as valuable
   information resources.

   This document attempts to represent a community consensus, and as
   such it can never really be authoritative. However, if you find
   technical errors within this document, or have suggestions about
   items that should be added, please either submit a PR, or email
   the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list. Thanks.

   1.1. What is the purpose of the FreeBSD mailing lists?

   1.2. Who is the audience for the FreeBSD mailing lists?

   1.3. Are the FreeBSD mailing lists open for anyone to participate?

   1.4. How can I subscribe?

   1.5. How can I unsubscribe?

   1.6. Are archives available?

   1.7. Are mailing lists available in a digest format?

   1.1. What is the purpose of the FreeBSD mailing lists?

   The FreeBSD mailing lists serve as the primary communication
   channels for the FreeBSD community, covering many different topic
   areas and communities of interest.

   1.2. Who is the audience for the FreeBSD mailing lists?

   This depends on charter of each individual list. Some lists are
   more oriented to developers; some are more oriented towards the
   FreeBSD community as a whole. Please see this list for the current
   summary.

   1.3. Are the FreeBSD mailing lists open for anyone to participate?

   Again, this depends on charter of each individual list. Please
   read the charter of a mailing list before you post to it, and
   respect it when you post. This will help everyone to have a better
   experience with the lists.

   If after reading the above lists, you still do not know which
   mailing list to post a question to, you will probably want to post
   to freebsd-questions (but see below, first).

   Also note that the mailing lists have traditionally been open to
   postings from non-subscribers. This has been a deliberate choice,
   to help make joining the FreeBSD community an easier process, and
   to encourage open sharing of ideas. However, due to past abuse by
   some individuals, certain lists now have a policy where postings
   from non-subscribers must be manually screened to ensure that they
   are appropriate.

   1.4. How can I subscribe?

   You can use the Mailman web interface to subscribe to any of the
   public lists.

   1.5. How can I unsubscribe?

   You can use the same interface as above; or, you can follow the
   instructions that are at the bottom of every mailing list message
   that is sent.

   Please do not send unsubscribe messages directly to the public
   lists themselves. First, this will not accomplish your goal, and
   second, it will irritate the existing subscribers, and you will
   probably get flamed. This is a classical mistake when using
   mailing lists; please try to avoid it.

   1.6. Are archives available?

   Yes. Threaded archives are available here.

   1.7. Are mailing lists available in a digest format?

   Yes. See the Mailman web interface.

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2 Mailing List Etiquette

   Participation in the mailing lists, like participation in any
   community, requires a common basis for communication. Please make
   only appropriate postings, and follow common rules of etiquette.

   2.1. What should I do before I post?

   2.2. What constitutes an inappropriate posting?

   2.3. What is considered proper etiquette when posting to the
   mailing lists?

   2.4. What are the special etiquette consideration when replying to
   an existing posting on the mailing lists?

   2.1. What should I do before I post?

   You have already taken the most important step by reading this
   document. However, if you are new to FreeBSD, you may first need
   to familiarize yourself with the software, and all the social
   history around it, by reading the numerous books and articles that
   are available. Items of particular interest include the FreeBSD
   Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document, the FreeBSD Handbook,
   and the articles How to get best results from the
   FreeBSD-questions mailing list, Explaining BSD, and FreeBSD First
   Steps.

   It is always considered bad form to ask a question that is already
   answered in the above documents. This is not because the
   volunteers who work on this project are particularly mean people,
   but after a certain number of times answering the same questions
   over and over again, frustration begins to set in. This is
   particularly true if there is an existing answer to the question
   that is already available. Always keep in mind that almost all of
   the work done on FreeBSD is done by volunteers, and that we are
   only human.

   2.2. What constitutes an inappropriate posting?

   * Postings must be in accordance with the charter of the mailing
     list.

   * Personal attacks are discouraged. As good net-citizens, we
     should try to hold ourselves to high standards of behavior.

   * Spam is not allowed, ever. The mailing lists are actively
     processed to ban offenders to this rule.

   2.3. What is considered proper etiquette when posting to the
   mailing lists?

   * Please wrap lines at 75 characters, since not everyone uses
     fancy GUI mail reading programs.

   * Please respect the fact that bandwidth is not infinite. Not
     everyone reads email through high-speed connections, so if your
     posting involves something like the content of config.log or an
     extensive stack trace, please consider putting that information
     up on a website somewhere and just provide a URL to it.
     Remember, too, that these postings will be archived
     indefinitely, so huge postings will simply inflate the size of
     the archives long after their purpose has expired.

   * Format your message so that it is legible, and PLEASE DO NOT
     SHOUT!!!!!. Do not underestimate the effect that a poorly
     formatted mail message has, and not just on the FreeBSD mailing
     lists. Your mail message is all that people see of you, and if
     it is poorly formatted, badly spelled, full of errors, and/or
     has lots of exclamation points, it will give people a poor
     impression of you.

   * Please use an appropriate human language for a particular
     mailing list. Many non-English mailing lists are available.

     For the ones that are not, we do appreciate that many people do
     not speak English as their first language, and we try to make
     allowances for that. It is considered particularly poor form to
     criticize non-native speakers for spelling or grammatical
     errors. FreeBSD has an excellent track record in this regard;
     please, help us to uphold that tradition.

   * Please use a standards-compliant Mail User Agent (MUA). A lot of
     badly formatted messages come from bad mailers or badly
     configured mailers. The following mailers are known to send out
     badly formatted messages without you finding out about them:

       * cc:Mail

       * Eudora(R) (older versions)

       * exmh

       * Microsoft(R) Exchange

       * Microsoft Internet Mail

       * Microsoft Outlook(R)

       * Netscape(R) (older versions)

     As you can see, the mailers in the Microsoft world are frequent
     offenders. If at all possible, use a UNIX(R) mailer. If you must
     use a mailer under Microsoft environments, make sure it is set
     up correctly. Try not to use MIME: a lot of people use mailers
     which do not get on very well with MIME.

   * Make sure your time and time zone are set correctly. This may
     seem a little silly, since your message still gets there, but
     many of the people on these mailing lists get several hundred
     messages a day. They frequently sort the incoming messages by
     subject and by date, and if your message does not come before
     the first answer, they may assume that they missed it and not
     bother to look.

   * A lot of the information you need to supply is the output of
     programs, such as dmesg(8), or console messages, which usually
     appear in /var/log/messages. Do not try to copy this information
     by typing it in again; not only it is a real pain, but you are
     bound to make a mistake. To send log file contents, either make
     a copy of the file and use an editor to trim the information to
     what is relevant, or cut and paste into your message. For the
     output of programs like dmesg, redirect the output to a file and
     include that. For example,

 % dmesg > /tmp/dmesg.out

     This redirects the information to the file /tmp/dmesg.out.

   * When using cut-and-paste, please be aware that some such
     operations badly mangle their messages. This is of particular
     concern when posting contents of Makefiles, where tab is a
     significant character. This is a very common, and very annoying,
     problem with submissions to the GNATS Problem Reports database.
     Makefiles with tabs changed to either spaces, or the annoying
     =3B escape sequence, create a great deal of aggravation for
     committers.

   2.4. What are the special etiquette consideration when replying to
   an existing posting on the mailing lists?

   * Please include relevant text from the original message. Trim it
     to the minimum, but do not overdo it. It should still be
     possible for somebody who did not read the original message to
     understand what you are talking about.

     This is especially important for postings of the type "yes, I
     see this too", where the initial posting was dozens or hundreds
     of lines.

   * Use some technique to identify which text came from the original
     message, and which text you add. A common convention is to
     prepend "> " to the original message. Leaving white space after
     the "> " and leaving empty lines between your text and the
     original text both make the result more readable.

   * Please ensure that the attributions of the text you are quoting
     is correct. People can become offended if you attribute words to
     them that they themselves did not write.

   * Please do not top post. By this, we mean that if you are
     replying to a message, please put your replies after the text
     that you copy in your reply.

       * A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.

       * Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?

     (Thanks to Randy Bush for the joke.)

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3 Recurring Topics On The Mailing Lists

   Participation in the mailing lists, like participation in any
   community, requires a common basis for communication. Many of the
   mailing lists presuppose a knowledge of the Project's history. In
   particular, there are certain topics that seem to regularly occur
   to newcomers to the community. It is the responsibility of each
   poster to ensure that their postings do not fall into one of these
   categories. By doing so, you will help the mailing lists to stay
   on-topic, and probably save yourself being flamed in the process.

   The best method to avoid this is to familiarize yourself with the
   mailing list archives, to help yourself understand the background
   of what has gone before. In this, the mailing list search
   interface is invaluable. (If that method does not yield useful
   results, please supplement it with a search with your favorite
   major search engine).

   By familiarizing yourself with the archives, not only will you
   learn what topics have been discussed before, but also how
   discussion tends to proceed on that list, who the participants
   are, and who the target audience is. These are always good things
   to know before you post to any mailing list, not just a FreeBSD
   mailing list.

   There is no doubt that the archives are quite extensive, and some
   questions recur more often than others, sometimes as followups
   where the subject line no longer accurately reflects the new
   content. Nevertheless, the burden is on you, the poster, to do
   your homework to help avoid these recurring topics, and especially
   the dreaded bikesheds.

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4 What Is A "Bikeshed"?

   Literally, a bikeshed is a small outdoor shelter into which one
   may store one's two-wheeled form of transportation. However, in
   FreeBSD parlance, the word is a derogatory term that refers to any
   oft-recurring discussion about a particular subject; in
   particular, it is most often used to refer to a topic which has
   never reached a consensus within the FreeBSD community, and
   instead remains controversial. (The genesis of this term is
   explained in more detail in this document). You simply must have a
   working knowledge of this concept before posting to any FreeBSD
   mailing list.

   More generally, a bikeshed is a topic that will tend to generate
   immediate meta-discussions and flames if you have not read up on
   their past history.

   Please help us to keep the mailing lists as useful for as many
   people as possible by avoiding bikesheds whenever you can. Thanks.

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5 Acknowledgments

   Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org>

           Original author of most of the material on mailing list
           etiquette, taken from the article on How to get best
           results from the FreeBSD-questions mailing list.

   Mark Linimon <linimon@FreeBSD.org>

           Creation of the rough draft of this FAQ.

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           This, and other documents, can be downloaded from
                ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/.

 For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting
                        <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
   For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.
