Re: Mailing list cleanup proposal

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> writes:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> A while back I proposed some changes to gnome-announce-list, and someone
> replied that we should do a complete clean-up of the mailing list mess we
> have. So, back in September I did this, and spoke to a few people about it,
> but haven't had time to post it for discussion and do it.
> 
> It's mostly a cleanup of deprecated lists, and getting descriptions right.
> Jonathan asked what would happen to archives... About half of the deprecated
> lists are just shells, so their archives would be removed, the rest would be
> shifted with any list moves.

 - Keeping URL's pointing to posts working is very important; the
   URL on mail.gnome.org is the only way we have to an identify
   a post, and there are tons of links, say, from bugzilla 
   to the gtk-devel-list archives.

 - For that reason, you cannot merge archives between two lists;
   the numbering will be changed for both lists. If you want to
   do something complicated, you could merge the index pages; that
   is, put the entries for http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-ui-hackers/
   at the bottom of http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/  
   with a separate list.

 - If renaming a list, we should put in a redirect to point references
   to the old archives to the new archives.

 - If we get rid of a list because there is no traffic, that doesn't
   imply that it's archives aren't still interesting; 
   we should have a section at the bottom of http://mail.gnome.org/archives/
   for old lists.

 - Hmm...We should move the http://mail.gnome.org/archives/ index to a 
   multicolumn format or maybe add the descriptions there. The
   duplication between that index and http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/
   is a bit confusing to start with.

 - I think having the listinfo/ and archives/ indices non-flat would 
   probably help. (Maybe grouped by category - lists for hackers, lists for 
   developers,list for users.) Since listinfo/ is part of mailman, maybe we
   need to create our own index page and make listinfo/ a redirect
   to there.

Couple of particular comments:

> gnome-kde-list          NA      DL Mostly freedesktop.org stuff now?

I'd say so, xdg-list freedesktop org is the place for technical
discussion. gnome-kde-list was more political, but I'm not sure
we need a place for that :-).

> gnome-i18n-tools        NA      DL,MD gnome-devtools
 
 MD gnome-i18n probably better

> gnome-libs-devel        IU      RL,ID platform-devel-list (to fit with ddl)

Sounds like a reasonable rename to me, though of course, its
not going to cover the _entire_ platform.

> gnome-packaging-list    NA      DL,RT Greg - Is this still in use?

I think this is probably a case where there is a indentifiable
separate "community of people", even if the gpp is not doing
anything at the moment; it might be worth keeping around.

> libart                  NA      DL,MD platform-devel-list
> libart-hackers          NA      DL,MD platform-devel-list

Don't think these should be consolidated. At last check, they
were being used by various people outside of the "gnome platform" -
in particular KDE. And they are pretty non-gnome-ish in
design. (No GLib dependency, for one thing.) Consolidating
the lists would say we think they are GNOME only. (Lesson learned 
from gtk-i18n-list and Pango.)

Regards,
                                        Owen