Hi,
Here comes a draft for an email I would like to send out.
Not quite sure which audience we should choose … committers, (p)pmcs?
Also, not quite sure about the timeframe? As I know Infra merges PRs on
Thursdays, I would propose the 17th of August 2023 as date for the change to be
made. This would give project almost 2 weeks to react and adjust their .asf.yml
files, if they wish to stay at the current defaults.
So, I wasn’t sure, if I should add links to examples, as it would be putting
the project acting as negative example in an unfortunate spotlight and using
date ranges in ponymail links has been not quite successful in the past.
What do you folks think?
Chris
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Dear {Committers/members of the Apache PMCs},
over the years have we added additional options for discussing project matters
on a big variety of alternate locations and systems besides email lists, such
as JIRA and GitHub.
Especially GitHub has been growing in acceptance, as it generally allows
participating without requiring yet another login.
GitHub currently allows discussing things using: GitHub Issues, GitHub PRs and
GitHub Discussions.
Infra has built tooling, that forwards these discussions to our mailing-lists.
Unfortunately, some defaults were chosen, which have resulted in many dev-lists
being swamped with emails, for which no email-client was able to implement any
form of threading.
Some projects simply reacted by redirecting these emails to lists, such as
notifications@ or commits@.
Some projects even completely gave up communicating via email lists and only
“come back” for voting.
Even if the requirement “If it didn’t happen on the list, it didn’t happen”
sort of is fulfilled, it no longer fulfills what the core of this rule was:
To allow someone to asynchronously participate and find out what’s happening in
a project without requiring any form of login and to have some sort of archive
of all discussions about Apache projects on Apache hardware.
In Comdev we have been discussing how we could possibly address this and bring
back the usefulness of our mailing-lists.
The tooling Infra provides us with, already allows individual projects to
change the settings of the auto-generated emails and several projects have
already done so, with great success.
Comdev has therefore proposed to change the default settings for auto-generated
emails sent out for GitHub.
These changes will not change anything for projects hat already manage how the
emails should be formatted in their .asf.yml files, but it will affect all
projects, that didn’t explicitly do that.
For all projects willing to stay at the current format, we encourage to have a
look at this page and prepare their “.asf.yml” files accordingly:
https://community.apache.org/contributors/mailing-lists.html
(This page currently lists the current defaults here
https://community.apache.org/contributors/mailing-lists.html#configuring-the-subject-lines-of-the-emails-being-sent
as well as the proposed changes)
We will be changing the defaults on {date here}, so you still have some time to
prepare.
Chris, on behalf of the Comdev PMC
