"Netiquette" on "joining" existing newsgroup ?

[Esther Lumsdon]

There's an existing newsgroup, comp.lang.idl, with extremely low traffic
(2 articles in last 6 months). It was formed for discussion of "Interface
Description Language". A bunch of users of another IDL ("Interactive
Data Language") have discovered it, and each other, and want a newsgroup
somewhere to discuss our IDL, and a nearly identical derivative of it
called PV-WAVE.

We've come up with several ideas:
1) A news guru said it's ok to join existing group, as long as subject
lines for our articles are explicit about _which_ IDL the posting is
about. He says this is better for the net than 2 very low-volume newsgroups
would be.

2) Go through discussion and try to form our own newsgroup, knowing
that we may not have enough votes to do it. Can we count the 15 users
at 1 site as casting 15 separate votes?

3) Continue posting our stuff in the existing group comp.lang.idl, as
there hadn't been a posting in it in the 5.5 months prior to one of
us asking what this group is for. Sort of a polite takeover, with 1
poster politely defending the original charter of the newsgroup.

What does netiquette or Emily Postnews say on this? We could _really_
use communicating with each other about IDL and PV-WAVE.

Which is worse - 2 low-volume newsgroups or sharing a group that was 
created for quite another subject?


Is there another course of action, one of which we're unaware?

Oh, I looked at the comp.lang.functional discussion, and IDL/PV-WAVE
don't fit that definition. They're procedural vendor-supplied languages
with variables. IDL and PV-WAVE are "interactive, programmable image
calculator and display systems used in analysis of scientific data",
with sorta-signal-processing and nice data-reading and nice image-processing
capabilities.

Thanks for any guidance!
--------------- My thoughts are my own, not the Navy's ------------------
Esther Lumsdon     lumsdon at dtoa1.dt.navy.mil    lumsdon%dtrc.arpa
			  David Taylor Research Center, a Navy lab
			  Annapolis Lab  cm 301-267-3816   av 281-3816