"Thomas G. Marshall" <tgm2tothe10thpower@replacetextwithnumber.hotmail.com>
Patricia Shanahan said something like:
RC wrote:
Group comp.lang.java.help is for people ask for help.
Group comp.lang.java.programmer is for advance
people discuss and/or resolve the problems.
I keep hearing this, but it is not how the groups were defined,
and I would have objected during the discussion period and tried to
avoid that split if it had been proposed. The following quotations are
the charters from the call for votes message that led to the Java
newsgroup reorganization in 1997.
CHARTER: comp.lang.java.help
This unmoderated group is for immediate help on any Java problem,
especially when the source of the difficulty is hard to pin down in
terms of topics treated on other groups.
This is the appropriate group for end-users, programmers and
administrators who are having difficulty installing a system capable of
running Java applets or programs. It is also the right group for
people trying to check their understanding of something in the
language, or to troubleshoot something simple.
Subject lines should include the platform that the problem occurs on,
and the browser or compiler version, e.g. [win95 netscape 2.0], [linux
hotjava 1.0 beta2], etc.
This group renames comp.lang.java.setup.
END CHARTER.
CHARTER: comp.lang.java.programmer
This unmoderated group is for problems and discussion relating to Java
as a language, programming in general and the application of libraries
and APIs not covered under other groups.
If traffic is high enough, this group may later be split functionally.
In the meantime, posts specific to a class or package should include
its name at the beginning of the title, for example, [awt], [sun.net],
etc., to facilitate easy filtering.
This group merges (renames) comp.lang.java.misc, comp.lang.java.api
into the already existing comp.lang.java.programmer group.
END CHARTER.
There is nothing in this that says that only "advance" people should
post to .programmer. Instead, the charters focus, in my opinion rightly,
on the nature of the question.
And not even very forcibly even then. I have been hollering about this
for some time, and I finally got tired of it. There is a strange
acceptance of a sort of de facto ruling here which just does not exist. A
kind of techno urban legend.
According to the charters, a beginner with a difficult question should
post to .programmer. An experienced programmer with e.g. a setup problem
should post to .help.
And even then it's a little broadly ambiguous. "java as a language" and
"programming in general" could end up legitimately becoming the target for
many setup problems I've seen, since many setup problems are hard to
distinguish from misunderstandings in "java as a language" and
"programming in general".
problems. For example, "I tried to install Java, but it crashed halfway
through and now my registry is all FOOBAR. What do I do?" would go into
..help. "I'm a beginner and I want to learn how to program in Java" would go
But as you said, I've just accepted the non-existant defactor ruling. I
gave up telling someone in .programming to post in .help and vice versa.