On-topic vs off-topic and new lists Lassi Kortela 14 Jun 2020 10:41 UTC

>     My apologies, but what does any of this discussion have to do with
>     scheme?
>
> While I found the discussion fascinating, I agree that it has moved
> beyond the bounds of Scheme and SRFIs in particular.

Indeed, it is not on topic. I apologize for my part.

> If there's a call for it, I'll create an off-topic mailing list that our
> members can use to talk about such things.  I'll make sure that is not
> included in srfi-auto-subscribe.

No such requirement from me.

However, another list that would be useful is ideas for new SRFIs.
srfi-discuss is supposed to be about the SRFI process, not about the
technical ideas proposed in SRFIs. Quite often, on the list of a
particular SRFI, the discussion veers into new technical territory not
covered by that SRFI or any other existing one. In those cases we have
cc'ed those threads to srfi-discuss. That's not really appropriate but
we haven't had an alternative. Ending a technical thread whenever it
crosses the fairly narrow boundaries of a SRFI is not ideal either,
since cross-pollination and exploration of ideas is quite essential to
the development Scheme. We could cc the wide-ranging technical threads
to the R7RS-large list (and occasionally we've done that), but that list
has its own subscription mechanism (Google Groups) and SRFIs are not
only about R7RS.

It might be clearest to have two general-purpose lists:

* srfi-process
* srfi-ideas

The name "srfi-discuss" is sufficiently generic (probably for historical
reasons, if it was the first list that was made) that it sometimes
misleads people about its purpose. Would it be technically difficult to
rename it to "srfi-process" (keeping some kind of redirect mechanism so
that mails sent to xxxxxx@ still end up at xxxxxx@)?

Not sure whether "ideas" should be included in auto-subscribe.
Discussion would probably not be as focused as on the other lists.