On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 7:17 PM Mark Thomas <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 15/08/18 14:09, Jerrick Zhu wrote: > > Hi, mark > > > > Sorry for disturbing all of you. > > No need to apologise. The additional traffic wasn't, and isn't, a concern. > > My concern was that it appeared that there was some sort of organisation > going on that the project wasn't aware of. > > A secondary concern was that multiple teams seemed to be writing PRs for > the same issue. > > > This is an activity for students to participate in open source project, > > it's held by department named BaiJi, Alibaba. They came us and asked us > > If by us, you mean "the Alibaba employees who work on Dubbo" then that > request should have been redirected to the Dubbo community - which means > the dev@ mailing list.
+1. > > If by us, you mean "the Dubbo community" then I don't recall seeing that > request on this list. > > My concern here is that folks appear to have mixed up their "employee" > hat and their "Apache committer" hat. It is easy to do and so is > something to keep in mind. A good general rule is that whenever you find > yourself discussing anything related to the project at work (or anywhere > that isn't the project mailing lists), ask yourself "Why isn't this on > the dev@ list?". In my experience it is nearly always the case that the > conversation needs to move to the mailing list. Indeed, "If it did not happen on the mailing list, it did not happen." In fact I see the following challenges when I trying to advice people to move to the mailing list: * Language, most of them may feel they could not well express their ideas in English. My suggestion is bad English is better than good Chinese. And I will also encourage them to use Chinese followed by English as a complement. * Instant message first. People in China uses instant message app quite intensively, especially on mobile phone, as a result, instant message app is the first citizen in people's daily work, it is hard to let them move from instant message app to mailing list. I have to say the user experience of email app is far behind instant message app in terms of on the phone. I've been invited to several chat group, and are asked about questions about Dubbo. When I tried to respond with "Please ask on the mailing list", I see very low conversion rate, 1 out 10 people will do. * Preference for Github issue over mailing list. Since Dubbo has been open sourced for years, people get used to asked questions on Github issue when there was no mailing list. The preference can not be changed easily for existing users, IMO it is ok to discuss usage questions, bugfix, and minor changes on Github issues. But for feature request and major changes, I think it is the committers' responsibility to bring it back to dev list. > > To provide some examples: > > I am employed by Pivotal and Pivotal employs the committers on the > Spring Boot project which embeds Apache Tomcat. From time to time I > receive a work e-mail, slack message or similar along the lines of "We > think we have found a bug in Tomcat. Can you look at it?". My response > is invariably "Sure. Please create an issue in the Tomcat issue tracker > and I'll take a look." > > I also receive direct email from Tomcat users asking for help with an > issue they are having. This happens often enough that I have a e-mail > template for the reply that directs them to ask their question on the > users@ mailing list. > > > to > > provide some simple issues that students can fully engage OS project, and > > we agreed. We also wants more guys to join Dubbo, to contribute. > > Please be aware that some people read "guys" as referring exclusively to > men. I recommend that you try to use a more inclusive term. I tend to > use "folks". "people" usually works as an alternative as well. > > I do think this is an excellent way to increase interest in Dubbo and > expand the community. Please don't take anything I am saying as > discouragement of this effort. I am fully supportive of it. > > > Now we have noticed that the PRs came together and generate so many emails, > > which had disturbed you. We will consider other more effective ways, such > > as one team fix issues separated from each other. > > It bears repeating. The volume of email was not a concern. It was the > appearance of some sort of organisation of project effort going on that > the project community was not aware of. That rings alarms bells for me > in my role as a mentor. > > Regarding separating issues between teams, there are pros and cons of > multiple teams trying to fix the same issue. The work might be > duplicated but, equally, they might learn from the different approaches > that the other teams took. I don't have a view one way or the other. All > I suggest (and this is more for the people managing the students) is > that the issue is thought about to ensure that the students get the best > possible experience. > > > Do you guys have any other suggestions? > > More of a comment than a suggestion. Given the volume of activity on the > notifications@ list, the activity on dev@ seems rather low. I'd expect > to see more discussion, more commentary, more planning given the > activity levels. It is possible that this discussion, commentary and > planning just isn't happening but I do find myself wondering if it is > happening off-list. If that is the case, it *really* needs to start > moving on to dev@ list. > > Cheers, > > Mark -- Best Regards！ Huxing
