RPM documentation gripes

[Richard Michael <rmichael fields utoronto ca>]

I'm sure I've overlooked something, but would anyone want to comment on
the following gripes?  (They've probably been covered, but for the
reasons below, I can't be sure!)

http://www.rpm.org/mailing_list/

says:

"This list is probably the best place to ask questions and get
authoritative answers on RPM usage and practice."

Given that, why is the list /archive/ restricted to members only?
Moreover, couldn't the website /mention/ that?  Users need to go through
two more links just to find out they can't /read/ the archive.

rpm-list isn't in google/usenet as an mlist.* type group, it's not 
listed at MARC, nor at the mail-archive!  So, it's not easily accessible
anywhere else (have I missed it somewhere?).

Worse, not only do users have to subscribe to access the archives, when
they do, they're not searchable -- only raw mbox archives!

These circumstances seem to indicate that for anyone to find the answer
to a question about RPM (not covered in the publicly available out of date 
documentation, or the linux.redhat.rpm) they need to:

1) subscribe to the list
2) download the 35MB archive
     (or take a random guess at a month that may contain the info)
3) learn extended regexps for grep
4) use grep on a raw mbox

This seems like a lot of work, even for sysadmins, forget newbies.  Now,
I'm sure I've overlooked something given that RPM is the most popular
package manager for GNU/Linux, right?

Does RPM still "belong" (in the maintenance sense) to RedHat?  Do they
provide thorough documentation?  If Sun left their package manager docs
up to a third party and didn't update them, wouldn't sysadmins be upset?

Richard