Hi, Because I requested to create a topic for MidoNet, Tom Fifield has asked me to raise awareness of mailing lists topics, and check whether people are cool with introducing topics to the openstack-operators list.
Topics are very similar to categories on a blog - a concept I hope people are familiar with or can easily grasp. A blog post can be tagged for no categories, a single category or multiple categories. If you check out a blog, you see all blog posts by default. But you can also click on a category and see only just blog posts that were tagged accordingly (independent of whether it's also in other categories or not). Likewise, on mailing lists, if no topics are set up or you are not subscribed to any, you receive all emails. If topics are set up and you are subscribed to one or several, you only receive emails that are tagged accordingly. In that case, you can also choose whether you wish to receive mails that are not tagged for any topic at all. An email is tagged by simply adding a tag to the subject line. Tags are, by convention, written in square brackets and put at the beginning of the subject. They are matched against a regexp, which is usually kept rather simple. For example, the Nova topic on the openstack-dev list [1] (where ~40 topics are defined) is ".*\[Nova\].*| .*\[nova\].*", thus matching all emails with either [nova] or [Nova] anywhere in the subject line. Hopefully, that was understandable - I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions as good as I can. I considered adding an example, but that would make this a much longer and more complex email and therefore I'm worried it would defeat its purpose. Let me instead discuss the benefits and drawbacks I see. The main benefit is clearly, that people can choose what emails they wish to receive. I think most people are subscribed to this list either because they wish to help others or because they wish to learn from others' experience. In both cases, they are probably interested in certain topics but not in others and it would lower the number of emails they receive - which makes it easier to pay attention to those threads that are important to them. The main drawback is probably that people might not tag their emails, or tag them improperly. But I'd expect that most people who subscribe to topics will choose to also receive those emails "just in case", so we should be good. Particularly in the beginning, there will only be a few topics (well, I figure we'd start with just one and MidoNet would bite the bullet) so people can slowly get accustomed to them. Once they are more established, it might make sense to add (many) more, like on the openstack-dev list. Frankly, many people already tag all their emails (to this list as well), even though no topics are set up (in which case they are treated like untagged emails since they don't match any regexp). I think we should already encourage always tagging emails, to make it easier to establish new topics in the future. Cheers, Sandro [1] http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev _______________________________________________ OpenStack-operators mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-operators
