OF announcement list? (was: Re: package maintainers please choose a package group)

[Olaf Till]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 07:51:16PM +0000, Carnë Draug wrote:
> ...
> > Le 15/03/2017 à 16:41, Carlo De Falco a écrit :
> >>> Julien Bect wrote:
> >>> ...
> >>> I suggest either of the following two options :
> >>>
> >>> a) Ask that all package maintainers should be subscribed to the
> >>> address@hidden
> >>>
> >>> b) If this list is considered to have too much traffic by some, perhaps
> >>> should we create a more specific, low-traffic list, dedicated to
> >>> general-purpose communications between OF admins and OF package 
> >>> maintainers
> >>> ...
> >>
> >> Search the archives to see the reason why such list, that once existed, was
> >> shut down and merged to the maintainers list.
> >
> > ...
> 
> There was never an Octave Forge developers mailing list.  There was a
> general purpose Octave Forge mailing list, kinda like core's help and
> maintainers mailing merged into one, but for OF only.  It's archives
> are still online [1].
> 
> The reason was to bring the two communities together and avoid
> fragmentation.  Here's the whole thread discussing the mailing lists
> [2] and the final announcement after discussion [3].  I think this was
> around the same we moved to savannah, to share the same bug tracker
> (I'm not 100% sure when that happened).
> 
> When it comes to provide help, it doesn't matter if it's help with
> core or functions with a package.  Users often don't even get that the
> function they are having problems comes from a package, and it's not
> nice to send to another mailing list.
> 
> For developers, a lot of discussions mattered to both core and forge
> developers so even though my initial proposal was to have a forge and a
> core maintainers mailing list, in the end we merged the two.
> 
> This was more than 4 years ago, and the core maintainers mailing list
> is a lot more active now.  Part of it I feel are things that ought to
> be on the bug tracker or on the help mailing list, but even without
> those it might still be too much for some package developers.
> 
> Maybe an OF announcement mailing list could be created for those
> maintainers that can't follow the core maintainers mailing list.
> 
> Carnë

There are many consequences of such a change to think over, and
problems either way... some thoughts:

Package maintainers should ideally all follow the development list. If
they don't, they should have a valid contact address in the package,
which can be used for urgent cases specific to this package.

We make some effort to reach even non-attending maintainers, to avoid
consequences to end users. But how much effort is made must be weighed
up against inconvenience for the others.

An announcement list is not sure to help. Even if we automatically
subscribe all package maintainers -- their addresses may get invalid.

Avoid mail duplication:

- Announcement list should get only announcements. Any discussion
  drifting into development should move over to development list.

- Development list should not duplicate announcements.

So we actually may reach some people less with a new list: If they
follow the development list but are not reached by the announcement
list.

Taken together I'd tend to keep the current state as long as possible,
and to limit our efforts to reach non-attending maintainers to
selected cases.

Olaf

> [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/mailman/octave-dev/
> [2] 
> https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/mailman/octave-dev/thread/CAPOrs_2wz4XnHJ_H%2B1d3QWzXQMv4Kb3vz1418mO%2BRAu0B8JgTw%40mail.gmail.com/#msg30137075
> [3] https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/mailman/message/30152424/
> 

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