[texhax] Other lists?

[Robin Fairbairns]

>     Does anyone have any suggestions for other TeX lists?  Preferably
>     one for advanced tex users/package writers?
> 
> There are zillions of TeX lists on particular topics, of course
> (http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/ has the ones hosted on tug, but there
> are lots of others), but I can't think of any "general" advanced lists.
> 
> As many long-time texhax members will recall, that is in fact (de facto)
> what texhax used to be.  After many years of activity, it somehow
> dwindled away and became moribund.

back when texhax was a digest-only list, it really didn't much help
people who were stuck.  the uktex list went some way in addressing the
problem, by having a group of suckers^w dedicated people who would
immediately answer, so that both question and answer appeared in the
digest.

both lists were on the wane at the time uk tug took over texhax and
merged them (and at that time there were no volunteers to provide the
"quick answers").  in fact, comp.text.tex was taking most of the
traffic, and it has remained a moderate-volume newsgroup.

> When texhax was moved to tug.org, we thought it would make sense to
> combine it with support at tug.org, so that instead of having two large
> lists for general questions and discussion, there would be only one --
> since there was hardly any "advanced" traffic coming into texhax, the
> distinction seemed to have been lost.

i find it interesting that texhax's role as a vibrant list has revived
so quickly, with its new "non-digested" capability.

this despite the ready availability of comp.text.tex first via deja-
news and now via google groups.

> If there is a consensus that a "high level" list would be useful once
> again, we're happy to create/host it, of course.  I'm not sure about it
> myself ...

me neither.  there's been a steady stream of proposals for splitting
comp.text.tex, from people who don't like the constant chatter.  they
always fail, because no-one dares dilute the expert attention.  i fear
that splitting texhax suffers from the same possible problem.