Proposal to remove some mailing lists

At the developers meeting in Ottawa, I was tasked to work on proposals to 
reduce the number of mailing lists.  For those who don't know the background:  
It has been brought up for some time in various contexts that there are too 
many PostgreSQL mailing lists with unclear purposes, leading to confusions 
about where to post (and cross-posting) as well as the effect that developers 
and contributors will essentially have to subscribe to all lists anyway to 
keep informed.  For example, many user issues might be somewhere in the 
middle of administration and SQL, making the distinction between these two 
lists appear less relevant, and many patches need discussion on hackers, so 
some have suggested merging the patches and hackers mailing lists.

Before we get to those more intrusive issues, I want to start with a few 
simple cases.

* pgsql-ports

This list receives very little traffic.  Most posts are on topic if you 
believe the mailing list descriptions, but would in practice better appear on 
other mailing lists, for example: "It doesn't compile on NormalUnix" -> 
pgsql-bugs, "How can I add support for StrangeUnix" -> 
pgsql-hackers, "Building PostgreSQL fails" -> pgsql-general or thereabouts.  
Most posts of those types already appear on other mailing lists anyway.  I 
believe posting to pgsql-ports doesn't give users better help, and reading 
pgsql-ports isn't very useful for monitoring porting issues either.

I suggest retiring that mailing list and asking users to post their issues to 
other mailing lists.

* pgsql-cygwin

This list receives almost no traffic anymore, and many are not on topic 
(confusing Cygwin with Windows in general).  Obviously, running PostgreSQL on 
Cygwin isn't the hottest topic anymore.

I suggest retiring this mailing list and redirecting users to other mailing 
lists, using the pattern I described above for pgsql-ports.

* pgsql-interfaces

This list used to be for ODBC, JDBC, and friends.  The former two have had 
their own forums for a long time now, so we are left with some 
undefined "friends".  Traffic is now at 10 to 20 posts a month.

The posts are now a mix of announcements about interfaces maintained elsewhere 
(e.g., new version of DBD::Pg or Ruby driver), some libpq usage questions, 
off-topic SQL questions, porting issues, and some completely unrelated 
PostgreSQL stuff.  It has become basically useless to read the list except 
for very dedicated PostgreSQL question-answerers.

I suggest retiring this mailing list.  There are better mailing lists for 
almost all posts here.


How to retire a mailing list -- I'm not sure if that has ever been done.  I 
have some idle thoughts:

- Send an announcement to the mailing list that it will be closed in 2 weeks 
or a month.  Perhaps some people will protest.

- Drop all subscriptions.  (Of course we should *not* subscribe them 
automatically to some other list.)

- Depending on the capabilities of the mail system, an informative bounce, 
perhaps pointing to the web site, should be sent for some time after the 
mailing list is shut down.