On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Bill Bogstad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I guess I need to make myself more clear.  I'm not telling developers
> not to be involved in support mailing lists.
> Nor am I suggesting that users shouldn't be allowed to "drink from the
> development firehose" if they desire.

I understand your intentions and I think they are good. However, we've
had some good long years of working the social groups that either make
positive open source communities blossom or get fragmented in a
thousand flamefesting factions.

> No, it's about forcing people to wade through email that won't help
> them and will always be irrelevant to them just so they can get their
> questions answered.

You don't have to read every thread. As long as we use good subject
lines for our emails, this will self-regulate quite well.

> So why is it that so many free software projects end up with separate
> user and developer mailing lists?

And ensuing unproductive divides. It's not a good look -- Debian (a
project I love) is one of the most jarring examples of this. The most
productive communities are split on /topic/. See the split in the
linux kernel lists, the split of the forums in moodle.org -- both
projects having leaders that know a lot about healthy (albeit
boisterous at times) communities.

Similar proposals for list splits are sometimes made on the
[EMAIL PROTECTED] list, and they are turned down too. The discussion
there is quite informative too.

So consider it a bit of social engineering if you want :-)

One thing to note is that deployment teams can opt to request support
via private channels -- which is a tradeoff. I do hope to get their
key engineers on the list. Everyone else, I'll help them if they can
cope with the noisy server-devel as it is. Life is tough sometimes!

cheers,



m
-- 
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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