NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Th Nav-L Email List
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2006 Apr 13, 09:49 -0600
From: Ken Muldrew
Date: 2006 Apr 13, 09:49 -0600
On 13 Apr 2006 at 11:14, George Huxtable wrote: > Which is fair enough. Would he agree, if I suggest that perhaps he may be a > bit out of his depth, in regard to our present missing-messages problem? > That's a serious matter, in my view, and needs taking seriously, not > belittled. But better not to destroy Nav-l to fix it. The list is hosted by Webkahuna. This is a server run by Andy Finkenstadt in part for his own use and in part as a modest altruistic effort to support a few online communities. The problems with Nav-L will certainly require Andy, and probably those upstream of him, to do a lot of work if they are to be fixed. There is very little anyone from this group can do to sort this out as it will require access to the Apache configuration files and logs. A list owner doesn't have those priveledges. Someone could ask Andy if he's willing to track down the bugs but as an unpaid volunteer, but I doubt he will be too keen. Having done such work in the past, I would need a lot of motivation; others, and perhaps Andy is one such, would do it merely for the technical challenge. He is a senior software developer and the problem may turn out to be easy for him to fix, but if you have ever read The_Cuckoo's_Egg by Cliff Stoll, you can appreciate how difficult it can be to track down apparently trivial problems with networked systems. In order to keep the old email address, we can either put up with the loss of list integrity or request Andy Finkenstadt to fix it, but there seem to be no other options. We can keep the list (but not the old email address) and fix the problems by migrating to the address that Frank has created. The new address not only fixes those problems, it also allows additional convenience (such as web-based posting) while maintaining an email-only interface for continuity. Just to repeat: we are arguing over the email address and the site of the server that directs traffic, not the list itself. If the community decides to move to a new server, the community (the "list") remains intact. Ken Muldrew.