you might have noticed an increase of diffs from openbsd devs on this list. this is a result of a policy change, partially in response to the belgian prick leaking our private list.
the policy we, the active OpenBSD developers, for our private list decided for is now: membership is tightly coupled to an active account on cvs.openbsd.org. Inactive developers have always been disabled (and re-enabled quickly when they became active again), since every account on cvs is a little risk. this means that many of the older, now inactive developers are thrown off our private list. plenty of them DO provide valuable input, at least once in a while, tho. thus we have decided that most of the traffic on our private list is shifted to tech@, and only security-critical diffs and other things not intended for the public stays on the internal list. this way, the inactive developers can stay in the loop, and non-developers (some of them probably not-yet-developers!) can join the loop. this is, for now, an experiment. for this to work out, using a public list like tech@ must not annoy us too much, or we'll have to shift back. thus, I'd like to ask you to follow a few "hints": -mails to tech@ without a diff attached should be a rare exception. really. we have misc@ for user questions. -if you tested a diff, reply to the originator only. there is no need for the entire list to see that. -if you see a problem with a diff, strongly consider just mailing the originator, too. -there will likely be jokes etc in some mails that make no sense without context, and the context is often a previous hackathon or so. please refrain from discussing these or asking for their meaning. -once in a while there will be "bikeshed" mails, without diffs, where a general direction decision is asked for. the intent is usually NOT a broad public discussion. strongly consider wether you really need to be part of that discussion. -the language we use to talk to each other might be emberassing to some people... but it is very efficient, and we know each other well enough to understand it right. no discussions about this, please. the general idea being - do not distract us too much. this is really about efficiency. we do the vast majority of openbsd work in our free time, and this is a very limited ressource. we rather use it for hacking than talking. when we want distraction, talk, etc, we go to misc. oh, and a general word - you will notice that many diffs get committed quickly after they've been posted. when widespread and intense testing is required, the mail with the diff will usually say so. you will also notice that many commits will not have the diff posted beforehands. many diffs just circulate between a couple of people in private mail - that has always been the case, we're just shifting the majority of diffs from our private list to t...@. I, and I think I can speak for all of us, really want this to work out. wether it does or we'll have to move back to a private list is largely up to you. thanks for your help!
