I'm happy enough with the idea of collapsing proton@ given that Protons scope is in some ways wider than when it started out (where the very specific protocol library made a good case for a separate list), but I don't think that list being separate is the main source of most of the confusion with proton. People have asked roughly the same basic questions about proton on users@ and proton@ at roughly the same time, which did indeed mean certain discussion with answers might have only gone to one of the lists at a time, but the key point for me was that they had to ask those basic questions on either list in the first place.
We are talking about improving communication, and for me the main problem is often that information isn't being written down or sent to any of the lists until someone asks a question requiring it. That question typically gets met with a [large] email explaining the answer, but much of the time it should be possible for the response to just be a link to somewhere the answer is already written down in general, e.g the website, with perhaps some context-specific additions. Some website update stats would probably entertaining right about now for example. I think users@ and dev@ should be left as is, and that we potentially just adjust how we use them slightly. These lists have existed for several years, and its the structure almost every Apache project works away just fine with; I don't think we are all that special in this regard. I also don't think we should subscribe everyone to a bunch of traffic they didn't sign up for. That said, this doesn't mean developers actually need to post discussion mails to dev@, the users@ list is always there and I know Gordon at least often posts only to that if it is a user related discussion, and I think that approach works well enough if others were to use it. The dev@ list can continue at least to hold things like the JIRA traffic (I could see ReviewBoard postings going to either list), even if general discussion moves to the users@ list. Summarising, I agree we need to be better at communicating, I think a bit of mailing list adjustment would be a good thing where proton@ could go and dev@ should stay in some guise, but that there are other problems with our communication that reducing the number of mailing lists potentially does little to solve. Robbie On 18 January 2013 17:21, Gordon Sim <[email protected]> wrote: > I believe that we have too many mailing lists and that we are missing out > on valuable collaboration and transparency as a result. > > Too often in the past topics have been discussed on the dev list without > reflecting any of the discussion back to the user list, keeping a large > part of the community in the dark. Now that we have a distinct list for > proton there is the possibility of yet more fragmentation. > > I honestly believe that we would be better off with just one list for > discussions. I think there will increasingly be issues that cross-cut > different components or that would benefit from wider participation. Not > all topics will be of interest to all subscribers, but that is always going > to be the case. > > It doesn't seem to me like any of the lists are so high in volume that > this would cause significant problems. More rigorous use of subject could > help people filter if needed. (JIRA and commit notices I think do warrant > their own lists allowing a lot of the 'noise' to be avoided if so desired). > > Any other thoughts on this? Does anyone have fears of being deluged with > unwanted emails? > > ------------------------------**------------------------------**--------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: > [email protected].**org<[email protected]> > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > >
