Well, I was really without an opinion one way or the other until I read
this. For my part, I have certainly asked a number of questions here,
primarily because they are heavy lifting questions and I found most of
the helpful souls in #drupal-support to be more of the site-building
types than bitheads, and when I first crossed paths with this list it
was apparently already 'polluted,' so I came away thinking this was what
it was for. And also, I freely admit that I found a lot of pleasure in
reading opinions on the best way to accomplish things FROM people like
Angie, Earl, Randy, Dave, Larry and the other heavy hitters. In a world
where, despite best intentions, the architecture is not necessarily
intuitive, the handbook often falls short (yes, I need to help out
there) and the demand on us as developers leaves less and less time
available to spend 2-3 hours hunting and reading to empower 5 minutes of
coding, it was one of the few places I've had a warm and fuzzy feeling.
All of that, though, was simply my ignorance as to what this list is
supposed to be. So, all of that said, I think those who established it
and used it while it was still being what was intended ought to make the
decision. I'm quite happy to seek assistance wherever a place exists,
and, now that I know, excited to think that there can again be a place,
here or wherever you all decide, for me to eavesdrop on the types of
discussions that used to occur here.
Jeff
On 03/17/2011 10:58 PM, Angela Byron wrote:
Well, that's essentially what this list has become, and why most of
the people who used to frequent the list back in 2005-2007 no longer do.
It used to be that this list was for high-level strategical
discussions around core/contrib/d.o development, active brainstorming
on big problem solving, important announcements that affected CVS (now
Git) account holders, and those sort of things. What we currently
(badly) use "meta" issues and a variety of fragmented groups on g.d.o
for, was what this development list was for at one time. Support
questions were directed to the forums or to IRC.
However, over time, the volume of support requests coming into this
list for "Is there a module that does what I want?" and "How come my
code is broken?" have far out-stripped most of the veterans' ability
to ask, repeatedly, for them to be taken off-list. And so most of them
have by now vacated the premises in favour of lower-traffic IRC
channels like #drupal-contribute or to groups.drupal.org
<http://groups.drupal.org> silos. These mediums have now mostly taken
over the core function the mailing list used to, but in an ad-hoc,
"you only know about it if you happened to be there or if some kind
soul wrote a summary in the issue queue about it" fashion. This
"support creep" has been happening in lots of other places too over
the past couple of years: #drupal, issue queues, etc. and it all only
exacerbates the problem of the more dedicated and hard working
individuals withdrawing away from the larger community in an attempt
to maintain some sort of sanity. All of which is *extremely*
detrimental to our community, including the people who need support.
I believe Randy's proposal is an attempt to rectify this situation,
and get this mailing list back to its roots, by providing an alternate
mechanism for both support and important announcements. I don't agree
that shuffling contributors off of Drupal.org <http://Drupal.org> is
the answer (I have a long-winded, ranty blog post about this I need to
write up sometime...), but I also frankly don't believe that this list
will ever overcome the stigma/reputation that's grown up around it
among the core group of contributors, even if we were all to do a
concerted effort to get the content back under quality control. It's
easier to just give up and call a spade a spade (or, in this case, a
development support list a development support list). :(
