Tom Lane wrote:
I can see the need for small tightly-focused special lists.
How about a list devoted to discussions about reorganizing the lists? It would get plenty of traffic, and then I could not subscribe to that and have that many less messages to read.
There is only one viable solution to reduce list traffic: ban forever everyone who top-posts or doesn't trim what they quote. Maybe some other old-school Usenet rules too--can we ban those with incorrectly formatted signatures and finally add proper bozo tagging? Praise Kibo.
Seriously though, I file admin/general/performance into one user oriented folder, hackers/committers into a second, and all the non-code ones (advocacy, www, docs) into a third. I don't think there's any way to restructure those lists that will improve life for people who try to keep up with most of them. I was traveling yesterday and busy today, and now I'm 350 messages behind. No amount of rijiggering the lists will change the fact that there's just that much activity happening around PostgreSQL. You can move the messages around, but the same number are going to show up, and people who want to keep up with everything will have to cope with that. The best you can do is get better support in your mail program for wiping out whole threads at once, once you've realized you're not interested in them.
The only real argument to keep some more targeted lists is for the benefit of the people who subscribe to them, not we the faithful, so that they can have something that isn't a firehose of messages to sort through. Is it helpful to novices that they can subscribe to a list when they won't be overwhelmed by traffic, and can ask questions without being too concerned about being harassed for being newbies? Probably. Are there enough people interesting in performance topics alone to justify a list targeted just to them? Certainly; I was only on that list for a long time before joining any of the others. Are the marketing oriented people subscribed only to advocacy and maybe announce happy to avoid the rest of the lists? You bet.
Folding, say, performance or admin into general, one idea that pops up sometimes, doesn't help those people--now they can only get the firehose--and it doesn't help me, either. If you can keep up with general, whether or not the other lists are also included in that or not doesn't really matter. Ditto for hackers and the things you might try and split out of it. It's just going to end up with more cross posting, and the only thing I hate more than a mailbox full of messages is discovering a chunk of them are dupes because of that.
I might like to see, for example, a user mailing list devoted strictly to replication/clustering work with PostgreSQL. That's another topic I think that people are going to want to ask about more in the near future without getting overwhelmed. But, again, that's for their benefit. I'll have to subscribe to that, too, and in reality it will probably increase the amount of messages I read, because people will ask stuff there that's already been covered on other lists, and vice-versa.
-- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support g...@2ndquadrant.com www.2ndQuadrant.us -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
