[Stow-devel] RFC: rationalisation of Stow mailing lists

[Adam Spiers]

[This has been deliberately cross-posted to 3 lists; please reply to all.]

Hi all,

We currently have four mailing lists for stow.  Given the extremely
low traffic, I think that's at least one too many.  Here are the
subscription statistics:

  info-stow:  26 (of which 7 appear to be list archivers)
  help-stow:  21 (of which 6 appear to be list archivers)
  bug-stow:   19 (of which 5 appear to be list archivers)
  stow-devel: 21 (of which 6 appear to be list archivers)

There is a large amount of overlap in subscribers between the lists,
and I suspect that most of the discrepancies are due to spreading
ourselves too thinly and not making it clear what belongs where.  For
example, if you want to discuss an idea about a new way of using Stow
(and this has happened to me and one other person in the last few
days), it's not really a plea for help, or a bug report, or a
development topic, or an announcement, so not of those four lists are
named in a way which suggests that your post belongs in that list.

Therefore I propose the following:

  - Keep info-stow as an announcements-only list (this seems to be
    the GNU convention for info-*).

  - Keep stow-devel as a developers-only list.

  - Merge help-stow and bug-stow into a new `stow-users' list.
    Technically speaking, this would involve closing the two old
    lists, creating the new one, automatically signing up all human
    subscribers of the old lists to the new one, and informing the
    mail archivers of the change.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Adam