Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: blewis@arwen-142.eng.sun.com (Bil Lewis)
Subject: RFD: comp.programming.threads
Organization: Acadia University
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 11:36:04 GMT
Message-ID: <1995Jul14.113604.22815@relay.acadiau.ca>

                    REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
              unmoderated group comp.programming.threads

Proposer: Bil Lewis <Bil.Lewis@SUN.COM>
Newsgroup line: All issues surrounding Multithreaded Programming

This is a formal request for discussion on the creation of an unmoderated
newsgroup, comp.programming.threads

This RFD has been posted in accordance with the Guidelines for Newsgroup
Creation. This RFD is being posted to the following relevant newsgroups:

news.announce.newgroups, news.groups, comp.programming, comp.lang.c,
comp.lang.c++, comp.os.mach, comp.os.misc, comp.unix.misc,
comp.unix.programmer, comp.parallel

Discussion will take place in news.groups ONLY.  Please post follow-ups
to news.groups only.

This is not a call for votes (CFV).  Please do not vote now.

                               RATIONALE

Multithreaded (MT) programming is a relatively new programming paradigm in
the industrial world, and has seen explosive growth in the past couple of
years.  MT libraries exist for each of the major operating systems, and with
the advent of the POSIX standardization, the vast majority of these will
focus on providing libraries with identical APIs.  Even the major
proprietary libraries follow the general POSIX paradigm.

There is a growing need for a newsgroup to directly service (educate,
discuss, propogate information, etc.) the Internet community because more
and more programmers are writing MT programs, and many people don't
understand the technical or philosophical issues, can't spend the time
keeping up with the latest information, don't have a proper forum to discuss
new ideas, etc.

There is currently no newsgroup which is specifically for the discussion of
MT.  Although there are newsgroups for the individual vendors and general
programming, most of the current and best discussions go on in
vendor-internal mailing lists and the more general newsgroups.  These are
not bad things, but they fail to serve the wider programming community as
effectively as would be desirable.

In particular, a great many issues are broad, MT issues (as opposed to
vendor specific issues), and by separating them out into the individual
vendor newsgroups, the broader community interested in MT remains unaware.

                                CHARTER

The purpose of this newsgroup is to serve as a central location in which MT
can be discussed and investigated.  Questions, comments, discoveries, code
snippets and new product information can be discussed, among other issues.
It will be unmoderated and open to discussion of all aspects of MT
programming.

                                PROCEDURE

After a discussion period of 30 days, if there are no overwhelming
objections to the formation of the group, a CFV (Call For Votes) will
be posted to the same groups as this RFD.  The voting period will be
as outlined in the Guidelines (a minimum of 21 and not more than 31
days).  If the vote passes, then the group will be created.  A passing
vote requires a 2/3 majority, and at least 100 more "YES" votes than
"NO" votes.  Voting procedures will be documented in the CFV, and the
vote will be conducted by a neutral third party.  Further details on
the Guidelines and the process by which this newsgroup proposal is
being conducted are available in the news.newgroups FAQ archive (via
anonymous FTP to ftp://rtfm.mit.edu).


