[Rd] requesting a new SIG mailing list

[Martin Maechler]

Hi,

I'm the "site maintainer" of the R-SIG-... at r-project.org mailing
lists (and back from vacations).

>>>>> Sarah Goslee <sarah.goslee at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:16:01 -0500 writes:

    > Hi all,
    >> It would be great if Sara of someone of the maintainers
    >> of the r-sig-ecology list could add that info to the info page.

    > I'm talking with the other maintainer about revising both
    > the short and the long descriptions.

    >> I think that r-sig-env would be much more intuitive for
    >> environmental scientists coming from fields different
    >> from ecology, but I don't think it is possible to change
    >> the name of an existing mailing list.

yes, that would be only doable with much effort,
and (unless even more effort is put in) it would invalidate all
current links to the current archives etc. 

    >> However, I'm wondering if it would be possible to create
    >> an alias termed 'r-sig-env' to 'r-sig-ecology' ?, in
    >> order to make the name of the list more intuitive for
    >> environmental scientists but without disturbing the
    >> current users.

    > I don't know that there is any mechanism for doing either
    > of those things.  Changing the name would be disruptive,
    > and I don't know of an alias option. 

there is none, on the mailing list level.
On the mail server side, I could create such aliases,
but then these would only apply to e-mail addresses and the ML
software would still "speak" of the official ML name...

Given all the issues and opinions heard so far, I'd also
propose trying to have hydrologists and other env.scientists
join the r-sig-ecology for the time being.

Brian Ripley has already mentioned the very important point, 
that there's some often non-negligible admin overhead for each
list, and I can add that indeed, we have had several lists that
always remained too small and so never "started flying".

    > I think ecology is a more inclusive term than
    > environmental anyway, but then I'm an ecologist.

    > Sarah

ah, that's an interesting side issue, and at first somewhat
counter intuitive to a layman like me,... but after thinking a bit
about the meaning of the words, most will have to agree with you.
{but please let's not start a thread on that now..}

Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich