Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Chris Faylor]

Recently, Cygwin contributions are starting to kick into high gear so
we've been using the cygwin-announce list to announce updates and new
packages.

This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.

One person went so far as to vaguely threaten me that his company won't
be interested in purchasing Cygwin if the managers can't read the
announce list due to the overwhelming flow of messages.

This person has pointed me to the FAQ at sourceware/lists.html which
indicates that announcement lists only get one message a month.  The FAQ
also indicate that digests are useless for announcement lists.

Neither of these is currently true of cygwin-announce.  We've been
averaging two or three announcements per week so using
cygwin-announce-digest is actually a nice way to get a weekly list of
announcements.  Of course, you miss the potential urgency of a critical
announcement in this scenario but I can't think of what could be the
need for a critical announcement where cygwin is concerned.  Unless
maybe one of the packages had a virus.  Hmm.

My preference is to ignore this person and add some ameliorating words
to the FAQ but I would be interested in hearing what the collective
overseers wisdom thinks about this weighty issue.  The complaining user
righteously indicated that he barely ever gets any email on any of the
other sourceware announcement mailing lists.  It's pretty obvious to me
that Cygwin is different but I can't think of any other alternative to
using cygwin-announce other than setting up YA mailing list, which I am
really loathe to do.

cgf

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Wed, 17 May 2000, Chris Faylor wrote:
> This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
> can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.

I had a look, and that's really a bit much for an announcement mailing
list.

For GCC, we probably send out too few annoucements (which I plan to
address in the future), but as a user and subscriber to quite a couple of
announcement lists, I usually wouldn't expect more than one announcement
per week on average.

How about sending a human generated digest at most once a week? That
way you can still reach subscribers "immediately" in case of urgent
notifications.

Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jim Kingdon]

> Recently, Cygwin contributions are starting to kick into high gear so
> we've been using the cygwin-announce list to announce updates and new
> packages.

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether you really want to do that
(it has made comp.os.linux.announce much less widely read, for
example).  The idea of a weekly list of new packages (the way that
Linux Weekly News - http://lwn.net/ - prints such a list taken from
freshmeat) might be a good way to handle this.

> This person has pointed me to the FAQ at sourceware/lists.html which
> indicates that announcement lists only get one message a month.  The FAQ
> also indicate that digests are useless for announcement lists.

I've reworded this to be more concise and not quite so prescriptive.
Whatever the right answer for cygwin-announce, I doubt that trying to
lawyer with the FAQ is the best way to deal with it.

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jeffrey A Law]

  In message < 20000517231239.A7748@cygnus.com >you write:
  > Recently, Cygwin contributions are starting to kick into high gear so
  > we've been using the cygwin-announce list to announce updates and new
  > packages.
  > 
  > This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
  > can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.
The horror! :-)


  > One person went so far as to vaguely threaten me that his company won't
  > be interested in purchasing Cygwin if the managers can't read the
  > announce list due to the overwhelming flow of messages.
Sounds like someone Cygnus probably doesn't want to have as a customer
anyway....


  > Neither of these is currently true of cygwin-announce.  We've been
  > averaging two or three announcements per week so using
  > cygwin-announce-digest is actually a nice way to get a weekly list of
  > announcements.  Of course, you miss the potential urgency of a critical
  > announcement in this scenario but I can't think of what could be the
  > need for a critical announcement where cygwin is concerned.  Unless
  > maybe one of the packages had a virus.  Hmm.
  > 
  > My preference is to ignore this person and add some ameliorating words
  > to the FAQ but I would be interested in hearing what the collective
  > overseers wisdom thinks about this weighty issue.  The complaining user
  > righteously indicated that he barely ever gets any email on any of the
  > other sourceware announcement mailing lists.  It's pretty obvious to me
  > that Cygwin is different but I can't think of any other alternative to
  > using cygwin-announce other than setting up YA mailing list, which I am
  > really loathe to do.
One possibility is to turn on moderation and do a by-hand digested announce
list.  If you've got a time critical issue, then you just approve that message
immediately.

jeff

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Chris Faylor]

On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:38:42PM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
>On Wed, 17 May 2000, Chris Faylor wrote:
>> This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
>> can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.
>
>I had a look, and that's really a bit much for an announcement mailing
>list.
>
>For GCC, we probably send out too few annoucements (which I plan to
>address in the future), but as a user and subscriber to quite a couple of
>announcement lists, I usually wouldn't expect more than one announcement
>per week on average.

But GCC is one package and cygwin is, potentially, scores of packages.

>How about sending a human generated digest at most once a week? That
>way you can still reach subscribers "immediately" in case of urgent
>notifications.

I was trying to minimize my efforts actually but I guess I can investigate
if this is simple to do.

cgf

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jason Molenda]

On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 11:12:39PM -0400, Chris Faylor wrote:

> This person has pointed me to the FAQ at sourceware/lists.html which
> indicates that announcement lists only get one message a month.  The FAQ
> also indicate that digests are useless for announcement lists.

I wouldn't worry over the wording of that page - I was just describing
existing practice.

FWIW I agree with the poster a bit.  I used to be on a redhat-announce
mailing list long ago which just had announcements for new RH
releasese.  I'd get one e-mail ever six months or something.  Then
they started sending announcements about new RPMs that were available;
I'd get stuff like "New version of xeyes available!!" every day or
so.

There is a reason why digests aren't allowed for announce lists.  The
digest function can work by one of two ways:  You can have a crontab that
checks all mailing lists and sees if a new digest should be sent out, or 
you can have the digest checks happen whenever a new note comes in to the
mailing list.

I opted for the latter out of laziness.

With an announce list, you'll get one mail note sent in (say)
February and then no more mail sent until (say) October.  When that
Oct note goes through the mailing list processing, ezmlm will notice
that the max time limit for the Feb note has been exceeded (it's
set to 24 hours on our lists), and it'll send out a digest of the
Feb and Oct messages.

When I realized that people were getting on digest versions of
announce lists, I changed the subscriber cgi-bin script so that it
wouldn't allow people to do that any more.

If we enabled the crontab digest thing, and we changed the digest
criteria for cygwin-announce to a timeout period of say a week,
then it would do what you're thinking of.


> My preference is to ignore this person and add some ameliorating words
> to the FAQ but I would be interested in hearing what the collective
> overseers wisdom thinks about this weighty issue.  

That works too.


J

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Tom Tromey]

>> This person has pointed me to the FAQ at sourceware/lists.html which
>> indicates that announcement lists only get one message a month.  The FAQ
>> also indicate that digests are useless for announcement lists.

Jason> FWIW I agree with the poster a bit.  I used to be on a
Jason> redhat-announce mailing list long ago which just had
Jason> announcements for new RH releasese.

Would having a second announce list be that big a problem?
Or just having a web page that lists new packages in the order they're
made available?  (Like, e.g., Gnome does)

Tom

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jim Kingdon]

> If we enabled the crontab digest thing, and we changed the digest
> criteria for cygwin-announce to a timeout period of say a week,
> then it would do what you're thinking of.

Don't we need to do this for other reasons?  Like xconq7 might hit
this problem (although not quite as bad).  And it probably isn't the
only non-announce list which might have quiet periods.  Especially if
people were hoping for daily digests.

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jason Molenda]

On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:21:29PM -0700, Tom Tromey wrote:

> Would having a second announce list be that big a problem?

Does it make any sense for cygwin?  I mean, "Cygwin" is just a dll;
updates to that (although important) are not what most users care
about -- they care if a new version of GCC or GDB has been added
to the Cygwin environment.

I don't know if the cygwin folks are even planning on having
"releases" any longer.  Maybe that will happen as some people want
ultra-stable sets of packages and some people want ultra-bleeding-edge
sets of packages.  If the concept of a "cygwin release" has meaning
again in the future, then having separate -announce lists would
(IMHO) make sense.


Jason

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Chris Faylor]

On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:29:25PM -0700, Jason Molenda wrote:
>On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:21:29PM -0700, Tom Tromey wrote:
>> Would having a second announce list be that big a problem?
>
>Does it make any sense for cygwin?  I mean, "Cygwin" is just a dll;
>updates to that (although important) are not what most users care
>about -- they care if a new version of GCC or GDB has been added
>to the Cygwin environment.

I think you're right.  This was my assumption but the complaints are
causing me to rethink things.  Of course, you never know if there are
just a few disgruntled people or the tip of an iceberg.

>I don't know if the cygwin folks are even planning on having
>"releases" any longer.  Maybe that will happen as some people want
>ultra-stable sets of packages and some people want ultra-bleeding-edge
>sets of packages.  If the concept of a "cygwin release" has meaning
>again in the future, then having separate -announce lists would
>(IMHO) make sense.

We will probably have another big "release" only if we change binary
compatibility in the Cygwin DLL.  I'm not sure that my frail
constitution is up to the amount of agony that such an event would
cause, though.

cgf

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Andrew Cagney]

Chris Faylor wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:38:42PM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> >On Wed, 17 May 2000, Chris Faylor wrote:
> >> This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
> >> can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.
> >
> >I had a look, and that's really a bit much for an announcement mailing
> >list.
> >
> >For GCC, we probably send out too few annoucements (which I plan to
> >address in the future), but as a user and subscriber to quite a couple of
> >announcement lists, I usually wouldn't expect more than one announcement
> >per week on average.
> 
> But GCC is one package and cygwin is, potentially, scores of packages.
> 
> >How about sending a human generated digest at most once a week? That
> >way you can still reach subscribers "immediately" in case of urgent
> >notifications.
> 
> I was trying to minimize my efforts actually but I guess I can investigate
> if this is simple to do.

Create cygwin-news.  Hmm, actually, create the ``cygwin newsletter''
that is released each week and has a corresponding web page .... (am I
serious?).

	Andrew

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Chris Faylor]

On Fri, May 19, 2000 at 09:52:18AM +1000, Andrew Cagney wrote:
>Chris Faylor wrote:
>> 
>> On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:38:42PM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
>> >On Wed, 17 May 2000, Chris Faylor wrote:
>> >> This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
>> >> can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.
>> >
>> >I had a look, and that's really a bit much for an announcement mailing
>> >list.
>> >
>> >For GCC, we probably send out too few annoucements (which I plan to
>> >address in the future), but as a user and subscriber to quite a couple of
>> >announcement lists, I usually wouldn't expect more than one announcement
>> >per week on average.
>> 
>> But GCC is one package and cygwin is, potentially, scores of packages.
>> 
>> >How about sending a human generated digest at most once a week? That
>> >way you can still reach subscribers "immediately" in case of urgent
>> >notifications.
>> 
>> I was trying to minimize my efforts actually but I guess I can investigate
>> if this is simple to do.
>
>Create cygwin-news.  Hmm, actually, create the ``cygwin newsletter''
>that is released each week and has a corresponding web page .... (am I
>serious?).

Have you looked at the number of cygwin mailing lists?  I'm really loathe
to create another one.

cgf

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Wed, 17 May 2000, Chris Faylor wrote:
> This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
> can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.

I had a look, and that's really a bit much for an announcement mailing
list.

For GCC, we probably send out too few annoucements (which I plan to
address in the future), but as a user and subscriber to quite a couple of
announcement lists, I usually wouldn't expect more than one announcement
per week on average.

How about sending a human generated digest at most once a week? That
way you can still reach subscribers "immediately" in case of urgent
notifications.

Gerald
-- 
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/~pfeifer/

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jason Molenda]

On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:21:29PM -0700, Tom Tromey wrote:

> Would having a second announce list be that big a problem?

Does it make any sense for cygwin?  I mean, "Cygwin" is just a dll;
updates to that (although important) are not what most users care
about -- they care if a new version of GCC or GDB has been added
to the Cygwin environment.

I don't know if the cygwin folks are even planning on having
"releases" any longer.  Maybe that will happen as some people want
ultra-stable sets of packages and some people want ultra-bleeding-edge
sets of packages.  If the concept of a "cygwin release" has meaning
again in the future, then having separate -announce lists would
(IMHO) make sense.


Jason

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jim Kingdon]

> If we enabled the crontab digest thing, and we changed the digest
> criteria for cygwin-announce to a timeout period of say a week,
> then it would do what you're thinking of.

Don't we need to do this for other reasons?  Like xconq7 might hit
this problem (although not quite as bad).  And it probably isn't the
only non-announce list which might have quiet periods.  Especially if
people were hoping for daily digests.

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jason Molenda]

On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 11:12:39PM -0400, Chris Faylor wrote:

> This person has pointed me to the FAQ at sourceware/lists.html which
> indicates that announcement lists only get one message a month.  The FAQ
> also indicate that digests are useless for announcement lists.

I wouldn't worry over the wording of that page - I was just describing
existing practice.

FWIW I agree with the poster a bit.  I used to be on a redhat-announce
mailing list long ago which just had announcements for new RH
releasese.  I'd get one e-mail ever six months or something.  Then
they started sending announcements about new RPMs that were available;
I'd get stuff like "New version of xeyes available!!" every day or
so.

There is a reason why digests aren't allowed for announce lists.  The
digest function can work by one of two ways:  You can have a crontab that
checks all mailing lists and sees if a new digest should be sent out, or 
you can have the digest checks happen whenever a new note comes in to the
mailing list.

I opted for the latter out of laziness.

With an announce list, you'll get one mail note sent in (say)
February and then no more mail sent until (say) October.  When that
Oct note goes through the mailing list processing, ezmlm will notice
that the max time limit for the Feb note has been exceeded (it's
set to 24 hours on our lists), and it'll send out a digest of the
Feb and Oct messages.

When I realized that people were getting on digest versions of
announce lists, I changed the subscriber cgi-bin script so that it
wouldn't allow people to do that any more.

If we enabled the crontab digest thing, and we changed the digest
criteria for cygwin-announce to a timeout period of say a week,
then it would do what you're thinking of.


> My preference is to ignore this person and add some ameliorating words
> to the FAQ but I would be interested in hearing what the collective
> overseers wisdom thinks about this weighty issue.  

That works too.


J

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jim Kingdon]

> Recently, Cygwin contributions are starting to kick into high gear so
> we've been using the cygwin-announce list to announce updates and new
> packages.

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether you really want to do that
(it has made comp.os.linux.announce much less widely read, for
example).  The idea of a weekly list of new packages (the way that
Linux Weekly News - http://lwn.net/ - prints such a list taken from
freshmeat) might be a good way to handle this.

> This person has pointed me to the FAQ at sourceware/lists.html which
> indicates that announcement lists only get one message a month.  The FAQ
> also indicate that digests are useless for announcement lists.

I've reworded this to be more concise and not quite so prescriptive.
Whatever the right answer for cygwin-announce, I doubt that trying to
lawyer with the FAQ is the best way to deal with it.

Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Chris Faylor]

Recently, Cygwin contributions are starting to kick into high gear so
we've been using the cygwin-announce list to announce updates and new
packages.

This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.

One person went so far as to vaguely threaten me that his company won't
be interested in purchasing Cygwin if the managers can't read the
announce list due to the overwhelming flow of messages.

This person has pointed me to the FAQ at sourceware/lists.html which
indicates that announcement lists only get one message a month.  The FAQ
also indicate that digests are useless for announcement lists.

Neither of these is currently true of cygwin-announce.  We've been
averaging two or three announcements per week so using
cygwin-announce-digest is actually a nice way to get a weekly list of
announcements.  Of course, you miss the potential urgency of a critical
announcement in this scenario but I can't think of what could be the
need for a critical announcement where cygwin is concerned.  Unless
maybe one of the packages had a virus.  Hmm.

My preference is to ignore this person and add some ameliorating words
to the FAQ but I would be interested in hearing what the collective
overseers wisdom thinks about this weighty issue.  The complaining user
righteously indicated that he barely ever gets any email on any of the
other sourceware announcement mailing lists.  It's pretty obvious to me
that Cygwin is different but I can't think of any other alternative to
using cygwin-announce other than setting up YA mailing list, which I am
really loathe to do.

cgf

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Andrew Cagney]

Chris Faylor wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:38:42PM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> >On Wed, 17 May 2000, Chris Faylor wrote:
> >> This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
> >> can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.
> >
> >I had a look, and that's really a bit much for an announcement mailing
> >list.
> >
> >For GCC, we probably send out too few annoucements (which I plan to
> >address in the future), but as a user and subscriber to quite a couple of
> >announcement lists, I usually wouldn't expect more than one announcement
> >per week on average.
> 
> But GCC is one package and cygwin is, potentially, scores of packages.
> 
> >How about sending a human generated digest at most once a week? That
> >way you can still reach subscribers "immediately" in case of urgent
> >notifications.
> 
> I was trying to minimize my efforts actually but I guess I can investigate
> if this is simple to do.

Create cygwin-news.  Hmm, actually, create the ``cygwin newsletter''
that is released each week and has a corresponding web page .... (am I
serious?).

	Andrew

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Jeffrey A Law]

  In message < 20000517231239.A7748@cygnus.com >you write:
  > Recently, Cygwin contributions are starting to kick into high gear so
  > we've been using the cygwin-announce list to announce updates and new
  > packages.
  > 
  > This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
  > can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.
The horror! :-)


  > One person went so far as to vaguely threaten me that his company won't
  > be interested in purchasing Cygwin if the managers can't read the
  > announce list due to the overwhelming flow of messages.
Sounds like someone Cygnus probably doesn't want to have as a customer
anyway....


  > Neither of these is currently true of cygwin-announce.  We've been
  > averaging two or three announcements per week so using
  > cygwin-announce-digest is actually a nice way to get a weekly list of
  > announcements.  Of course, you miss the potential urgency of a critical
  > announcement in this scenario but I can't think of what could be the
  > need for a critical announcement where cygwin is concerned.  Unless
  > maybe one of the packages had a virus.  Hmm.
  > 
  > My preference is to ignore this person and add some ameliorating words
  > to the FAQ but I would be interested in hearing what the collective
  > overseers wisdom thinks about this weighty issue.  The complaining user
  > righteously indicated that he barely ever gets any email on any of the
  > other sourceware announcement mailing lists.  It's pretty obvious to me
  > that Cygwin is different but I can't think of any other alternative to
  > using cygwin-announce other than setting up YA mailing list, which I am
  > really loathe to do.
One possibility is to turn on moderation and do a by-hand digested announce
list.  If you've got a time critical issue, then you just approve that message
immediately.

jeff

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Chris Faylor]

On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:38:42PM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
>On Wed, 17 May 2000, Chris Faylor wrote:
>> This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
>> can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.
>
>I had a look, and that's really a bit much for an announcement mailing
>list.
>
>For GCC, we probably send out too few annoucements (which I plan to
>address in the future), but as a user and subscriber to quite a couple of
>announcement lists, I usually wouldn't expect more than one announcement
>per week on average.

But GCC is one package and cygwin is, potentially, scores of packages.

>How about sending a human generated digest at most once a week? That
>way you can still reach subscribers "immediately" in case of urgent
>notifications.

I was trying to minimize my efforts actually but I guess I can investigate
if this is simple to do.

cgf

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Chris Faylor]

On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:29:25PM -0700, Jason Molenda wrote:
>On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:21:29PM -0700, Tom Tromey wrote:
>> Would having a second announce list be that big a problem?
>
>Does it make any sense for cygwin?  I mean, "Cygwin" is just a dll;
>updates to that (although important) are not what most users care
>about -- they care if a new version of GCC or GDB has been added
>to the Cygwin environment.

I think you're right.  This was my assumption but the complaints are
causing me to rethink things.  Of course, you never know if there are
just a few disgruntled people or the tip of an iceberg.

>I don't know if the cygwin folks are even planning on having
>"releases" any longer.  Maybe that will happen as some people want
>ultra-stable sets of packages and some people want ultra-bleeding-edge
>sets of packages.  If the concept of a "cygwin release" has meaning
>again in the future, then having separate -announce lists would
>(IMHO) make sense.

We will probably have another big "release" only if we change binary
compatibility in the Cygwin DLL.  I'm not sure that my frail
constitution is up to the amount of agony that such an event would
cause, though.

cgf

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Tom Tromey]

>> This person has pointed me to the FAQ at sourceware/lists.html which
>> indicates that announcement lists only get one message a month.  The FAQ
>> also indicate that digests are useless for announcement lists.

Jason> FWIW I agree with the poster a bit.  I used to be on a
Jason> redhat-announce mailing list long ago which just had
Jason> announcements for new RH releasese.

Would having a second announce list be that big a problem?
Or just having a web page that lists new packages in the order they're
made available?  (Like, e.g., Gnome does)

Tom

Re: Need opinions on the cygwin-announce list dilemma

[Chris Faylor]

On Fri, May 19, 2000 at 09:52:18AM +1000, Andrew Cagney wrote:
>Chris Faylor wrote:
>> 
>> On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 12:38:42PM +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
>> >On Wed, 17 May 2000, Chris Faylor wrote:
>> >> This has resulted in an increase in complaints from people who just
>> >> can't stand the flood of 13 email messages this month alone.
>> >
>> >I had a look, and that's really a bit much for an announcement mailing
>> >list.
>> >
>> >For GCC, we probably send out too few annoucements (which I plan to
>> >address in the future), but as a user and subscriber to quite a couple of
>> >announcement lists, I usually wouldn't expect more than one announcement
>> >per week on average.
>> 
>> But GCC is one package and cygwin is, potentially, scores of packages.
>> 
>> >How about sending a human generated digest at most once a week? That
>> >way you can still reach subscribers "immediately" in case of urgent
>> >notifications.
>> 
>> I was trying to minimize my efforts actually but I guess I can investigate
>> if this is simple to do.
>
>Create cygwin-news.  Hmm, actually, create the ``cygwin newsletter''
>that is released each week and has a corresponding web page .... (am I
>serious?).

Have you looked at the number of cygwin mailing lists?  I'm really loathe
to create another one.

cgf