in other words, people were meant to subscribe either to haskell or to haskell+haskell-cafe, and posting to haskell was meant to be a flag able to raise a topic briefly over the general din in haskell-cafe.
Do people think that is working?
i don't think it is working anymore. haskell-cafe works (mostly;-), haskell sometimes works, sometimes seems a distinction without a difference, and more and more often causes confusion (where to post? who is on what list?)
Also, I think HWN now does a good job of bringing the current issues to the haskell@ readers.
yes, if HWN was more, well, weekly,-) it would nicely cover that job. there is the secondary issue that we'd actually want to alert the haskell@-only readers to discussions early, so that it doesn't take a week before they join a discussion on what to do with mailing lists!-) but i have the feeling that those who are likely to join discussions have taken to at least browsing haskell-cafe as well?
(note that the second is slightly misleading: *everything* is off-topic on haskell@ after a few exchanges, i think; note also that crossposting was explicitly ruled out)
I don't think cross-posting works well on the lists at all; unless people do some magic they get 2 copies of all the mails, and you can end up with some subthreads only on one list and some only on another.
one might exaggerate the split intent as: any message to haskell@ should have its reply-to set to haskell-cafe. but i agree, neither split threads nor crossposts are nice, but they are a reality. the current welcome message discourages crossposts. nevertheless, they are used, for instance, for HWN, and for this present thread, because we are no longer sure of the original assertions, as expressed in the original split: Welcome to the Haskell Cafe http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/haskell-1990-2006/msg07680.html we either need to guarantee that haskell is a sublist of haskell-cafe (so crossposts are never needed, because noone is subscribed to cafe only, and any accidental crossposts could be filtered from cafe; all threads are archived in full in the cafe archive, no matter which parts appeared where), or we have to find another way to make this list combination work. personally, i could live with (as proposed) haskell-cafe + hwn + haskell-announce + hcar but i wanted to point out that the post-split haskell@ was not meant to be limited to announcements. it is just that 'low traffic, stay-in-touch-only' has proven to be too vague a charter to work well. which is why we're having this thread, i believe?-) claus