Charlie Summers <charlie@lofcom.com> writes: ...
However, the list belongs to the maintainer (or at least the machine's admin), not the members. You'll get no argument from me that the list should be moved (I believe I said exactly that a couple of times), but to suggest the admins need to take a poll to ask what they may or may not do with the existing list is silly, to say the least. They are certainly able to move this list to mailman without the list subscriber's permission - indeed, they _have_ done so, which makes my point for me.
If the goal is to maximize the quality of the list, polling the subscribers _may_ provide useful information in making a decision on how to proceed. Other constraints may make the opinions of the list participants moot. I would assume that the flimsiness of the current connection between SmartList and RWTH-Aachen means that in the list of priorities for the admin at RWTH-Aachen, the happiness of the list members is much less important than the effort/time required. As the lead sysadmin at an academic institution, I'll opine that this is how it should be.
Whether we should move this list to a SmartList server is a completely seperate issue...one which Philip should probably weigh in on, since he is now maintaining the procmail/SmartList source and as such the de facto head of our band of merry wanderers...
The maintainer is not the leader. The job of maintainer is to express the concensus desire in a machine readable form. For those with parlimentary body experience, "Chairman of the standing committee for development" would probably be a better analogue for my position. Hmm, perhaps that should be "Chairman-at-large" given that I'll be moving in less than a month... Anyway, I don't really care what software is used to run this list: the list is just a tool. Heck, the earliest versions of the Linux C library were developed by H. J. Lu on a Dec Alpha running OSF and cross-compiled for the i386. Whatever gets the job done. I think this says more about the community of smartlist users and how that community developed than it does about smartlist itself. As for moving this list, I can tell you what it'll take: 0) you volunteer and let the list know that you're going to go for it. Having the support of the list would be a Good Thing. 1) you set up the server. 2) you email Stephen, wait a couple days, then call him, asking for his support. In particular, he'll need to be willing to: a) forward smartlist-users@procmail.org to your address, and b) vouch for you to the Aachen admins 3) you email or call the admins at RWTH-Aachen and ask that they send you the current subscribers list. Suggest that they call Stephen to confirm your legitimacy. 4) once you have your list populated, you talk to the Aachen admins again and schedule the changeover. They'll need to send you any last minute changes to the subscribers list, then set smartlist@lists.rwth-aachen.de to be forwarded to your address. Volunteers? Philip Guenther