signal-to-noise on d-d-l

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

I was talking with someone in the office today (not very associated with
GNOME) and I mentioned someone posting a patch to d-d-l.[1] Their
response was 'oh, d-d-l- that's not for work, that's for talking about
flags and things like that.' That was pretty sad.  I recommended it to a
new Novell person two weeks ago, and given the recent content, I realize
I probably made a mistake. And I know some fairly useful contributors
have unsubscribed, because they don't feel it is worth their time or
their bandwidth.

What's particularly sad is that two years ago d-d-l /was/ a pretty high
signal/noise list- lots of good, important development conversations,
and it was a good list for any relative newbie who wanted to understand
what was going on. I think any healthy project that wants to think of
itself as a single project needs a main list- d-d-l has been that list,
and is in danger of splintering, which sucks.

So... I'm not sure what can really be done about it. Maybe stricter
moderation of posts by non-contributors, or some guidelines about what
is 'topical' (roughly?) I'm not sure, but it seems like it would be
worth our while to think about it.

Ranting/venting,
Luis

[1] Not a good thing, but could be worse.