Re: signal-to-noise on d-d-l

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Sat, 2004-02-14 at 00:09, jorge o. castro wrote:
> Luis Villa wrote:
> >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.
> 
> Long time lurker here, not a dev (just a fan) but I've been around long 
> enough to spot trends so I thought I would comment on this.
> 
> IMO the -devel lists exist for the GNOME developers. While the 
> development of GNOME is done "in the public", any noise done on a -devel 
> list does nothing more than distract developers with opinions that are 
> better kept in other mediums.
> 
> For example, the Evolution 2.0 thread should have ended at "Maintainer 
> says no, end of thread." But it didn't. Now we have more opinions of 
> what GNOME developers _should_ be doing instead of real work going on. 
> Ditto with the flag thread. Users like myself have gnomedesktop.org and 
> umpteen avenues to express our views, material like this shouldn't be 
> cluttering -devel lists, those should be used by actual GNOME developers 
> to get work done, period.
> 
> If I want to complain about default behaviors or $my_favorite_module 
> being ommited then there are plenty of places I can complain about 
> without adding noise to the -devel lists.

To be honest, this has been the only approach that I've been able to
think of that makes sense to me, and the examples Jorge has cited are
better support than I'd been able to think of myself. I'm instinctively
opposed to greater elitism (seeing as I'm not a developer myself,
technically speaking), and having to choose who does and doesn't get to
post to such a list seems scary at best. But the very low level of
cluefulness in a lot of recent posts really sucks, and it seems like
most of it is coming from people who are repeatedly posting without
having been forced through some kind of contribution to actually
understand the item at hand or GNOME in general.

replying to others:

Jeff, I don't think your proposals really solve the problem, they just
diffuse the problem over more lists, as far as I can see- most people
will still need to read all of them if they want to understand what is
going on, and wade through the attendant crap. Is my gut sense on this
wrong?

Havoc- you say 'where else are you going to discuss global desktop
issues', but the point I think Jorge framed well is 'who is it that is
discussing global desktop issues, and why are they contributing?'

So, strawman:

* d-d-l becomes subscribers-only for posting, with a readonly list. [I
know the admins hate this, but... I think it's important in this case.]

* we make sure the moderators are active- I volunteer myself for this,
since I read all the crap anyway, so it can't really make my life worse,
per se, and hopefully it'll make it better for others.

* all foundation members (someone else has already done the screening,
right?) get subscribed to start, and after that the bar is low-
moderators should accept subscriptions from anyone who has done even a
modicum of work for any module, inc. hacking, translation, bugs, docs,
marketing, a11y, UI, etc.. Enough to show that you've paid some
attention to GNOME and made effort to play nicely with others- nothing
huge, so that we make our best effort to encourage commentary and
contributions from new contributors.

Anyway, throwing this out to spark discussion. IMHO, it's an important
issue and we shouldn't let it die. :)

Luis