Re: Package mailing lists (was: bits from the DPL for September 2011)
On Wed, Nov 09, 2011 at 07:41:27AM +0900, Iustin Pop wrote:
Sorry for reviving and old email. To what extend do you think this
should apply - even at individual package level?
I ask this because of the following: recently I had a 1-1 discussion
with a co-maintainer of one of my packages, which went between our
personal emails. I quite disliked this (since it will be buried in our
mailboxes), but email conversations seem simpler than going through the
BTS for all discussions.
That's an interesting corner case, thanks for mentioning it.
The problem statement, as I see it, is that with private email aliases
there is no visibility of the activities that go through it. Therefore,
if the involved people (a maintenance team in your case) go MIA, nobody
will notices until some sort of timeout and the corresponding
frustration of people trying to contact the (former) team.
In the specific cases of packages though, the situation is better than
with other teams (e.g. infrastructure teams), because we've others
well-known ways of knowing if somebody is taking care of a package. We
can have a look at BTS activity and package uploads, for instance.
My take then it's, as long as work goes through the usual channels for a
package (such as the BTS), the lack of a public mailing list is less of
a problem than in other situations.
I can't help thinking, however, that as soon as a maintenance team
reaches the size of the magic number 3, they will *want* to have a
mailing list anyhow. Because starting from the size of 3, mailing a
single address is handier than enumerating your other co-maintainers.
(And if the address is a list, the better.)
I'm not sure how we can make it easier for small maintenance team to
have a mailing list. Maybe starting archiving @packages.d.o addresses
could be a first step?
What do others think?
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences .. http://upsilon.cc/zack .. . . o
Debian Project Leader... @zack on identi.ca ...o o o
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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Package mailing lists (was: bits from the DPL for September 2011)
On Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 03:48:35PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: - I've made the private email aliases considered harmful point [10], in a somehow unrelated thread. I ask you to watch out for interactions in Debian that could happen only through private email addresses. There are some cases where they are warranted (e.g. security or privacy concerns), but having regular activities of a team going through private email aliases harms us in so many ways. Please point me to project areas that could benefit from improvements on this front, ... unless you can just go ahead and fix the issue! Sorry for reviving and old email. To what extend do you think this should apply - even at individual package level? I ask this because of the following: recently I had a 1-1 discussion with a co-maintainer of one of my packages, which went between our personal emails. I quite disliked this (since it will be buried in our mailboxes), but email conversations seem simpler than going through the BTS for all discussions. On the other hand, http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/PackagingProject discourages requesting Alioth projects for smaller packages, so in that sense it encourages people contacting directly the maintainers via their emails, instead of having the archived, indexable lists. Could/should Debian make it easier for each package to have an own email list (i.e. making it easier to have 1-person team maintenance)? Or is BTS enough? (I don't think so, since it doesn't have a simple canonical entry point for all packages) regards, iustin signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Package mailing lists (was: bits from the DPL for September 2011)
[Iustin Pop]
Could/should Debian make it easier for each package to have an own email
list (i.e. making it easier to have 1-person team maintenance)?
We have {pkg}@packages.debian.org and {srcpkg}@packages.qa.debian.org.
I don't know if mail to these aliases get archived, but at least it is
going through Debian infrastructure. The latter even, I believe, uses
proper list software.
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Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/
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