[R] mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Tony" == Tony Plate <tplate at acm.org>
>>>>>     on Wed, 17 Dec 2003 18:04:34 -0700 writes:

    Tony> The suggestions of Tom (posting guide) and Andy (Eric
    Tony> Raymond's "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way") are
    Tony> both good.  Perhaps a good place to put an actual
    Tony> posting guide and a link to Raymond's page would be at
    Tony> the page pointed to by the link at the bottom of every
    Tony> posting to R-help (ie
    Tony> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help).

Thank you for the suggestion; note however that this is a
dynamically created page (by mailman) which is pretty tedious to
edit much, or even have much text added.  I can add one or two
short paragraphs with more hyperlinks; however I think it would
be better (and much better maintainable by all of R-core) to add
more to the "General Instructions" section of the R-project page
on the mailing list, http://www.R-project.org/mail.html#instructions
which is pointed to (and you also mention below), or even split
that page into more.  
Alternatively, even point to a page that you (someone in the R
community) maintain. 
      
    Tony> I'm pretty sure that most people who are discouraged
    Tony> from posting for fear of being scolded would be
    Tony> willing to read at least that page.  And currently
    Tony> there are not many guidelines for posting on either
    Tony> that page or on the "General Instructions" page it has
    Tony> a link to.

    Tony> Since these things happen only if some starts them,
    Tony> I'll post the raw beginnings of a posting guide by the
    Tony> end of the week (that is if there are no objections
    Tony> and no-one else beats me to it).

Yes, that would be real useful, and a service to the community,
please use "plain html" -- thank you in advance!


    Tony> On a related note, one of the few guidelines that is
    Tony> under the "General Instructions" seems to be
    Tony> potentially misleading to those who fail to understand
    Tony> the distinction between "R developers" and "package
    Tony> maintainers" (which is probably most beginners):

    >> It is recommended that you send mail to r-help (or
    >> r-devel if appropriate) rather than only to the R
    >> developers (who are also subscribed to the list, of
    >> course). This may save them precious time they can use
    >> for constantly improving R, and will typically also
    >> result in much quicker feedback for yourself.

We'll gladly accept improvements to this:

<p>It is recommended that you send mail to r-help (or r-devel if
appropriate) rather than only to the <em>R</em> developers (who are also
subscribed to the list, of course). This may save them precious time they
can use for constantly improving <em>R</em>, and will typically also
result in much quicker feedback for yourself. </p>

    Tony> (I say this seems misleading because I've seen quite a
    Tony>  few times, in response to a post about a problem with
    Tony>  a package, people told that they should have contacted
    Tony>  the package maintainer first.)

I'm not sure that this would be improved by a better text
above.  The main reason is that those posters are not aware of
the difference of the R standard packages and "arbitrary" CRAN packages
{the 'Recommended' ones taking a bit of a role in between: They
 do have unique maintainers, but problems potentially affect
 everyone, and R-core does take some moral responsibility for them} 

--------

Further on the orginal subject:

I think Frank Harrell's point ("not a different list, but a new
medium"!) and subsequent suggestions do make much sense:
If some of you can donate your time (and that *is* needed!) to
build and actively maintain a forum / bulletin board / web-"meeting place"
that could be a valuable "asset" for the R-project.  We (R core)
shouldn't have to use our resources for such a maintenance though.

Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>	http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/
Seminar fuer Statistik, ETH-Zentrum  LEO C16	Leonhardstr. 27
ETH (Federal Inst. Technology)	8092 Zurich	SWITZERLAND
phone: x-41-1-632-3408		fax: ...-1228			<><