Alek Markarian wrote:

>              Why i think that mailing list is not enough
>
> 1. About squeak mailing listS
> 1.1For some time i'm subscribed on both MLs - and that
> what i can say is that "squeak - annc" seems to me not
> functioning "in practice" (not physicaly of course) i see
> many announcements which go only through "squeak" only
> Squeak 2.8(?) , 2.9 and 3.0 in this number in fact for months
> i receved just 3 mails from "squeak-annc" :one for new Wisker
> release ,one for Squeak CD , and one "subscribe me" for which
> i have no idea how went to list if sender was not subscribed in the
> moment of sending (it was just few days ago) .

Your observation is correct. squeak-annc is/was intended for
announcements, but is little used. So the two posts that you got for the
Whisker release and the CD are in that list for a good reason, but there
should be more. Essentially, whenever something new is available, or
something relevant to the Squeak community happens, it should be
announced there.
But, mailing lists don't really work like that. Most Squeak users
(including me) subscribe to this list here and don't see any use in the
squeak-annc list. So if I have something to announce, where would I do
it? Here, of course, not in squeak-annc. Which makes that list pretty
useless.

>
> 1.2 Yes you are right that list is very helpfull and if i unsubscribe
> some day i'll miss advice and peoples on it - but i use a modem
> conection and i must call few times every day for avoiding problems
> with my mail box size and other connection problems. In fact this
> list contain a really important information and i would like if i
> have archives even if i lost my internet connection for some time
> but i didn't find any .zip which to download and just current index
> is more than 1MB html file .

I can fully understand your situation. In the "western" world, we're
very much used to fast connections, lots of disk space for mailboxes,
cheap internet access.
However, in countries like yours that is not so simple. These things are
still quite expensive there, and availability of resources is often
limited. Others, like most african countries, have no reasonable
internet access at all, which is really bad.
What can we do about it? Well, sharing resources like Dan Shafer
proposed is great but works in single cases only. He's certainly not
able to send everybody a Smalltalk book who needs one and does not have
easy access to a large book store.
One thing that would probably help you would be to have a digest version
of the mailing list. It would cut down a bit on the headers filling up
your mailbox but probably not enough.
Your idea of a zipped downloadable archive is great, and with Bob's zip
archive classes I will probably implement just that next week. I have a
www server under my control where I could give you access to the mailing
list in monthly or weekly collections as zipped files.
Would that be a help for your needs?

>
> 1.3 Possibly it worth Squeak ML to have its own page with
> some advices , rules , and explanations of capital letters like
> BTW (i imagine what it mean but still have no idea what IMHO
> means ) and some predefined subject list  i.e. "[ . . . ]"

Are you aware of the Swiki at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1 ?
There are a lot of Squeak-related informations to be found there.
BTW and IMHO are not Squeak-specific, but common abbreviations of common
english idioms. Since my native language is not english, either, I can
fully understand that you're a bit puzzled by this.
BTW: By the way
IMHO: In my humble opinion
Since I'm writing this mail offline (I have to pay by online time by the
minute, too...), I can't currently look up a dictionary of common idioms
and abbreviations on the internet, but I am fairly sure that such things
exist. Next week when I'm at work I can probably find some information
for you.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin