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

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2004 at 03:41:07PM +1100 or thereabouts, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Luis Villa">
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Much agreement from the cheap seats. I have had some suggestions coming
> about this:
> 
>   * The gnome-hackers/gnome-private/gnome-hackers-readonly mess should be
>     unfucked, it should be open for all to read, post and subscribe (except
>     gnome-private), and it should be the recommended place for cross-project
>     discussions - the 'main list' you mentioned above. I totally agree with
>     that idea.
> 
>   * desktop-devel-list should go back to being for discussion and management
>     of the GNOME Desktop release and modules *only*.

Agreed on both of these.

>   * A developer announce list should be created for announcement of major
>     changes, documentation, release management stuff, and so on. The only
>     reason I haven't created this already is that I didn't want to make big
>     changes mid-release, and I haven't decided on a name. ;-) I'm thinking
>     devel-announce-list or something. We should open this and subscribe
>     everyone on d-d-l to it when we open 2.7.

If we automatically subscribe everyone to yet another new list,
the very first post should be "You have just been subscribed to..
and here are the procmail and Evolution rules for sorting it."

I remember when gnome-hackers altered, and the first thing that
happened was that everything started pouring into the mail folder,
we had someone's "in order to email me, please send the following
string and I shall add you to my whitelist" script replying to
every single post, and lots of people who must have been set 
no-mail or just not reading starting going "Uh? What's this?"

However, I have another thought about this. The problem with
parallel -announce lists is that whilst at the time they are
made, the subscriber lists are identical, as people subscribe,
they forget about or don't notice or don't realise the relevant
of the -announce one and then a year later people start asking
"What is this announcement email you are replying to? Where
was it posted?"

Majordomo used to have a solution to this. I do not know
whether it is feasible in Mailman. I used to run a list
with a parallel -announce list. And the main list was, as
a whole, subscribed to the announce list. If that makes
sense. Something like this:

  gnome-hackers
  gnome-hackers-announce

Anything sent to gnome-hackers goes to gnome-hackers subscribers.
Anything sent to gnome-hackers-announce goes to gnome-hackers,
because "gnome-hackers" is subscribed to it. And it goes to 
anyone who has subscribed only to the -announce list, so they
get the announcements without the discussion. 

(Also, reply-to on the -announce is set to the main list :)) 

There is another problem, but that's for a different email.

Telsa