Douglas:

I am glad that you enjoy the fora. I do not, and will never switch from
the eMailing list.  If the eMailing list dies, then I will simply stop
interacting with the OpenSCAD community.

Don't assume that what you prefer is what others prefer.  I certainly do
not.

Jon

On 6/29/2021 9:07 AM, Douglas Miller wrote:

On Tuesday 29 June 2021 09:07:20 Douglas Miller wrote:

Not on whats left of my watch, taint gonna happen.

And join in the spammy junk that comes from reddit, not any better than
facebook IMO. I personally detest forums because the database never
shrinks, and most of them have search engines the couldn't find their
own butt with both hands. Mail, if you ignore the sigs like mine, is
generally neutral ground.

And it can be its own database. I use the older tde version of kmail, and
if I need to, I can search thru those lists worth saveing, going back 19
years.

If your choice of email agents cannot do that, it was your choice.

Forums with their passwords, soon to be forgotten, and wiped by changing
browsers and being locked out of several because your email or fixed ip
are known, preventing you from rejoining or even doing a passwd reset,
should be banned from wasting internet bandwidth. Read only access is a
pain in the ....

Cheers, Gene Heskett

"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

• Louis D. Brandeis
  Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 09:07:20 -0400, you wrote:

I too prefer forums, and r/openscad seems an excellent one, despite its
ads and brashness. I've already used it a little and will continue doing
so to complement this one.

But I'm a newcomer, with no long-standing allegiances or deeply-rooted
workflow routines. If I'd been a mailing list user for years I expect
I'd feel differently about it, rather like leaving a friendly club.

Terry

I believe in diversity. Plus, I am an OpenSCAD newbie so I am still trying
to soak up as much knowledge as possible. So, I will continue to use this
list, the subreddit forum, AND the OpenSCAD Facebook page. Three different
communities with lots of information.

On Tue, Jun 29, 2021, 11:05 Terry terrypingm@gmail.com wrote:

On Tue, Jun 29, 2021 at 9:12 AM jon jon@jonbondy.com wrote:

I am the same.  Fora are cul-de-sacs.  Things go in and eventually
they overgrow then die.

I would not join a forum.  I would stop interacting.

-ethan

On 6/29/2021 1:07 PM, Karl Exler wrote:

That line makes use of a recently added feature.  Make sure you're on
2021.01.

Yes that it in the requirements
https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib/blob/master/docs/usage.md

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 at 21:14, Jordan Brown openscad@jordan.maileater.net
wrote:

I am running
System:    Host: Ungarn-Bolide Kernel: 5.4.0-74-generic x86_64 bits: 64
compiler: gcc v: 7.5.0
           Desktop: Cinnamon 4.4.8 wm: muffin dm: LightDM Distro: Linux
Mint 19.3 Tricia
           base: Ubuntu 18.04 bionic

and they only a very old version via their repository service. How can I
install the newest version, you recommended?

thanks
Karl

Am 29.06.21 um 22:13 schrieb Jordan Brown:

Follow the link to the downloads page and go to the section "Other Linux".
I have used the App Image version on Ubuntu in the past.

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 at 21:26, Karl Exler karl.exler@meinklang.cc wrote:

I feel like the biggest issue with having only a mailing list is that past
posts are not discoverable by newcomers, which greatly limits its utility
as a general resource for the community. I know there's a mailing list
archive online, but it appears to be very buggy, as this thread has been
automatically merged with a completely different thread, rendering the
whole thing unreadable. I agree that Reddit probably isn't a great
knowledge archive either, but I think a persistent forum has concrete
utility.

On Tue, Jun 29, 2021 at 9:30 AM Ethan Dicks ethan.dicks@gmail.com wrote:

Forums, in general, are terrible for the actual software developers to use,
as it is almost impossible to follow everything. It's always been my
biggest problem with forums, you have to actively read everything, instead
of just reading the messages as they appear...
There is clearly a huge niche waiting to be filled that would somehow
supply the functionality of both a mailing list and a forum, but in a great
many years I haven't seen it. Usenet was close, but it is no longer
that....

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021, 16:47 Gareth Chen, garethenator@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday 29 June 2021 16:26:19 Karl Exler wrote:

Do a search of duckduckgo, for openscad.org, or goto

https://openscad.org/downloads.html#linux

and way down that page, download the AppImage for your architecture
into /home/you/AppImages, and make it runnable by you. That just got me
2021-06-24. Bookmark that page as there is a new version there at
nominally monthly intervals.

AppImages are 100% self contained.

That should run your code as its 5 months newer than the the required
2021-1.

Cheers, Gene Heskett

"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

• Louis D. Brandeis
  Genes Web page http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene

Any snapshot later than May 1st wont work as there is a huge regression bug
that nobody seems interested in fixing.

There are already some M8 screws in the library
https://github.com/nophead/NopSCADlib#Screws, cap head and hex head.

On Tue, 29 Jun 2021 at 22:02, Gene Heskett gheskett@shentel.net wrote:

On Tue, 2021-06-29 at 13:46 -0700, Gareth Chen wrote:

has the thread been merged, or is it that someone replied with a
different title, as often happens. I can't even count the number of
times I have not been able to find a thread because it does not show up
on the forum index page, but is buried under a different thread name.

On 6/29/21 4:46 PM, Gareth Chen wrote:

I don't use the archive. If it is buggy, it needs to be fixed.

Another (IMHO larger) issue is that newcomers, used to forums,
apparently can't be bothered to properly do trim-inline replies. That is
to leave enough of the message, they are replying to, as quoted context,
then adding their comment(s) below. Then trim all obsolete stuff. Done
right I don't even have to follow a thread. I can jump right into a
message and know exactly what that person is talking about and replying to.

This is the way we have done it successfully for about 25 years now on
the PostgreSQL mailing lists, and there is no way we are going to
replace it with twitter style top replies any time soon.

With either top or bottom quoting I often have to scan the whole message
to actually figure out what that comment is about. If I can't do that
within 10-20 seconds, I often just skip (unless the topic is really
important to me). As do most of the core developers in the PostgreSQL
community.

Think about this the other way around too. If it takes me two minutes
longer to format my message in a way, that saves 30 people 10 seconds to
read and comprehend it, we have a net gain of three minutes. Multiply
that with the message volume.

Best Regards, Jan

--
Jan Wieck

I can see how it can be easier to track everything that's going on in a
mailing list, but ideally the developers shouldn't need to be tracking
absolutely everything that's being discussed, because that doesn't scale.
If the community grows, most people's questions will just be about how to
use OpenSCAD, and it doesn't seem like developers would need to read every
single one of those. If there are bugs those can be escalated to a
different subforum or filed as a GitHub issue.

I don't use the archive. If it is buggy, it needs to be fixed.

The archive is now the only point of entry for folks who weren't subscribed
to the list beforehand, so this is a huge issue IMO. It's also not
discoverable at all, though that's also an issue of the Nabble forum being
the old entry point.

Another (IMHO larger) issue is that newcomers, used to forums,

I don't even think about quoted replies in emails because my client (Gmail)
hides them from me automatically. We can debate whether that's good or not,
but the fact of the matter is that's how mail clients have handled quoted
replies for almost 20 years, and it seems unlikely to change, no matter how
passive-aggressive you are about it. In this thread it looks like only
about half the participants have bothered to modify the quoting style, even
people who have always used the mailing list as their primary mode of
interaction.

This is the way we have done it successfully for about 25 years now on

I sense that you're using "twitter style" as a pejorative shorthand for
"frivolous modern web design", but top-posting has been a client default
for over 20 years at this point, and even Twitter is over 15 years old.
Maybe strict email style can be enforced in smaller developer-focused
communities, but it's not going to happen in a setting where normal users
are coming to ask for help.