TL;DR: Is the "pmcs@" alias the root of the problem? Need "pmcs-private@" and "pmcs-public@"?
Rich Bowen wrote: > I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you've never sent an email > message to all of the Apache dev lists. > [It] *always* results in at least one angry response, and usually a lot of > them. You're right -- I haven't. If that happens, it sounds like the work on Community Development is not yet finished, sadly. Anger distresses me even when I know it's not really personal, so I would find that concerning. But that's a digression, not the end of the matter. And I have some more insights now. Another non-private email recently came to private@, and the originator referred to sending email "to the PMCs". I don't know but suspect that they emailed the "pmcs@" alias in order to email "the PMCs". That sounds like a recipe for confusion. I discovered that in 2005 a resolution [3] was passed to rename all the mailing lists formerly called "p...@project.apache.org" (which were already private) to "priv...@project.apache.org" and to use these only for strictly private matters. This resolution is incorporated in the PMC Required Policies [2] and referred to in [1]. However, the "pmcs@" alias escaped the renaming and now points to all the "private@" lists. It should therefore only be used for strictly private matters, which is not suggested by its name. People aren't easily going to learn that. It seems to me it would be a good idea to rename that alias to something like "pmcs-private@" and remove "pmcs@". For matters which we wish to address to PMCs but need not be private, we should have some other alias: "pmcs-public@"? This should point to each project's most appropriate public mailing list. This would be "dev@" for Apache Subversion and probably for most projects, while any project could potentially use a public list that is separate from their dev list if they wished (although I vaguely recall recommendations to keep both kinds of discussions together for the sake of community over code). Although this is a fairly infrequent and individually small matter, it appears to be causing unintended contraventions of the ASF policies and I feel it contributes negatively to the Way by habituating people to discussing matters in private. Thoughts, anyone? Is this something we could improve, perhaps quite easily? [1] https://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#confidential [2] https://www.apache.org/dev/pmc.html#mailing-list-private [3] https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/Rename_pmc_lists_to_private.html -- - Julian --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
