A proposal for a 4.2 BSD f77 mailing list

[Donn Seeley]

At the Unix Fortran birds-of-a-feather meeting that was held at the
recent Salt Lake City Usenix conference, it was proposed that a mailing
list for 4.2 BSD f77 sufferers be created.  The idea was that this
mailing list would tie together the bug reports and fixes for the 4.2
BSD f77 compiler that have been appearing in the Usenet groups
net.bugs.4bsd, net.lang.f77 and net.unix-wizards (of which only
unix-wizards goes to ARPAnauts).  The medium of a mailing list was felt
to be superior to any attempt to use the existing Usenet news software
by an overwhelming plurality of the audience at the meeting.  I
volunteered (gulp!) to organize the list, and moderate it if that was
felt to be necessary.

Before embarking on the creation of yet another mailing list, I thought
I would canvass the readership of the original three groups (plus
Usenet news administrators) and see what you thought about the
following issues:

	Is a 4.2 BSD f77 mailing list necessary?  Would a (possibly
	moderated) Usenet news group be acceptable to you?  Should
	there be a Usenet group that is gatewayed to a list?

	Would you subscribe to the mailing list if it were created?
	What if it were only available as a Usenet news group?  If both
	forms were available, which would you subscribe to, if any?

	Would you contribute bug reports to a list or news group?
	Would you contribute bug fixes to it?

	Should the list or group be moderated for quality control?  How
	do you feel about the current level of quality in 4.2 BSD f77
	bug reports and fixes?  How long would you be willing to wait
	for a new fix to be approved?

	If you feel that the list needs to be moderated in order to
	ensure some sort of quality control, would you volunteer your
	site to run experimental versions of the compiler and libraries
	on production software?

If you feel up to organizing your thoughts on these questions, mail
your response to me at one of the following addresses and I will
summarize to the net when the dust settles down in a week or two.

Donn Seeley
Computer Science Dept.			donn at utah-cs.ARPA
Merrill Engineering Building		decvax!harpo!utah-cs!donn
University of Utah			hplabs!utah-cs!donn
Salt Lake City, UT 84112		arizona!utah-cs!donn
(801) 581-5668