Revisiting the utility of branch notifications

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Sit back and let Uncle Shaun tell you a story. A long time ago, GNOME
releases just kind of happened, and docs either happened with them or
they didn't. Usually they didn't. Then we implemented release schedules
with freezes. That helped the docs team a lot. We were able to start
documenting as of feature freeze without worrying much about everything
changing out from underneath us.

The only problem was that we weren't always sure when things branched
for new development. This was back in the CVS or SVN days. I'm not
sure. My memory is hazy. But we just didn't know. And back in those
days, we had to build everything ourselves, which was time consuming.
We didn't have Flatpaks. We didn't have Boxes. This might have even
been before jhbuild. So we required maintainers to send us an email
when they branched.

Then we switched to git, and we discovered we could just send those
notification emails automatically, which made maintainers' lives a lot
easier. And emails were more reliable, which made it easier for us to
spend too much time building software.

My question is, are these notifications still useful? Because there are
a lot of them, far more than the volume of real human conversation.

Discuss.

--
Shaun