On 3 Aug., 16:13, Simon King <simon.k...@uni-jena.de> wrote: > Hi all! > > On 1 Aug., 17:18, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote: > > > On 8/1/11 7:19 AM, Simon King wrote: > > > > sage-newbie, sage-solaris, sage-flame, sage-marketing and sage-edu > > > together made up for 133 posts in six months. Moving all of it to sage- > > > devel would mean an increment of about 4%. If part of it was moved to > > > sage-support instead, the increment would be even less. > > > sage-flame is an important separate release valve for anything on sage > > lists. I certainly don't think it should be merged with anything else. > > > +1 for disbanding sage-marketing and merging that with sage-devel. +1 > > for disbanding sage-newbie (encourage sage-support instead) and merging > > sage-solaris with sage-devel, and maybe even merging sage-windows with > > sage-devel. > > Then I ask directly: > > 1. Is it technically possible to merge two existing Google groups? > 2. Do we want less Google groups for Sage? > > To summarise what I've been arguing above: > > I. > New contributors are likely to post on the big lists. Having many > small lists can lead to one of the following situations: > > (a) Experienced people are busy on the small lists, thus, read sage- > support less frequently, thus, the big lists are less responsive. > (b) Experienced people ask to move the question to one of the smaller > lists, thus, the question remains unanswered for longer than > necessary. > > Both is frustrating for novices. > > The situation four years ago was much different. Both sage-devel and > sage-support were very responsive, and that has been one major reason > for choosing Sage as a platform for my computational projects. > > II. > Having a combined list for sage-nt, sage-algebra and sage-combinat- > devel would (according to figures from the past 6 months) result in a > list with little more than 7 posts per day. That should be small > enough so that all people interested in abstract nonsense could easily > follow - actually more easily than with three lists. In particular > when interested people are only subscribed to two of them. > > III. > Moving sage-solaris, sage-flame, sage-marketing and sage-edu to sage- > devel would yield an increment of (in average) less than one post per > day on sage-devel. I believe nobody can reasonably say that such a > little increment is a "flood with tons of technical details". A single > additional post per day could easily be filtered manually (i.e., > ignored), if necessary. > > IV. > sage-marketing and sage-edu concern topics which are perhaps not in > the centre of everybody's research interests. However, most are at a > university and could occasionally contribute to sage-edu, and I guess > that most people would at least have an opinion on marketing and could > occasionally contribute to sage-marketing (ok, that could be "painting > a bike shed"). Hence, why hiding these two topics from a larger > audience, putting them into a small list? > > V. > sage-windows discusses a topic that is said to be a major goal of > Sage. Hence, why not underlining its importance? Why not raising > alertness by exposing it to the "big audience"?
Thanks for summarizing the different aspects. I'd add at least two ot three though: * In a library, you don't mix (more or less) unrelated topics just because you have only a few books on topic E, F and G. Also, you wouldn't want to search the whole library when looking for books on subject D, (And searching the Google groups has already been said to be at least suboptimal.) * If Sage on Windows one day becomes what people hope, I'd expect heavy traffic on sage-windows (though many posts perhaps rather subject to sage-support or sage-release), so I'd prefer to keep that list. (Btw., the primary list for build errors is or should IMHO be sage-release, not sage-devel, to which most if not all [build-related] error messages by Sage exclusively refer to.) * The number or quantity of posts is not much an argument (unless you "unconditionally" just skip, delete or move them, like less obvious spam). Their subject line, length and content matters, too, and often it is not immediately clear from the title what the thread actually deals with, and/or the subject changes over time. So in the worst scenarios, you win nothing or even lose subscribers by merging groups, either because people keep ignoring the "new" threads or topics (and maybe even more which they otherwise would have read or responded to), or you keep people from reading and answering what they could and used to by flooding them with things they're not interested in, taking their whole time for sorting out which threads might be relevant to them, which also lowers the responsiveness. So IMHO there's no clear black and white, but only different shades of grey. The bike shed of course also always matters. ;-) -leif -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
