Bug 73642 – Too many mailing lists

• Product: Community Relations
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description Ivan Yosifov 2004-12-07 03:09:13 UTC]

Hello Everyone,

First of all - this is just an idea, if my impressions are wrong - pardon. 
It is my impression that gentoo has way too many mailing lists wich by themselves are not very active. For example I am a gentoo-desktop-research subscriber for mounths and have not recived a single message. 
I further believe that developer issues are always just developer issues. A java-plugin can expose a browser bug. A ppc specific problem my be a bug in the common kernel source. There is little reason for having a dozen separate lists when the issues discussed on these lists are related. As of now for a developer to have a full grasp of what ideas are flying about and what problems bother the users most he has to subscribe to ALL lists which is a lot of subscibe-me mails. 
Imagine a PPC user with security problem in the java plugin. Where can he discus his problem ? On gentoo-desktop, gentoo-security, gentoo-dev, gentoo-ppc-dev, gentoo-ppc-user, gentoo-java or somewhere else? Having so many lists with so deeply connected topics is confusing and a waste of valuable communication resources.
I propose the following. There should be a gentoo-announce list for GLSA,release announces and whatever everyone must be aware of. There should be a gentoo-dev for all development related issues (users having problems go here). And there should be a gentoo-user for users that need guidance (like how do I do this,where is that...).
Naturally the traffic on the dev and user list can get high. But no one forces the PPC dev to read the X.org threads so this should not be a problem.
Posting to Bugzilla as an RFE and to dev as an RFC. 

Ivan Yosifov.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
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[Comment 1 Donnie Berkholz (RETIRED) 2004-12-07 05:05:58 UTC]

I'd much rather be subscribed to 10 mailing lists targeted precisely to my interests than to 1 conglomerate list that had those 10 interests plus 37 others.

Also I don't understand your comment "valuable communication resources." What resources?

And the answer to your question of where to post is, wherever you want.

Even the effort involved in ignoring threads is nontrivial, once you've got 500 messages on 100 threads every day, and you only care about 5 threads a week.

[Comment 2 Ivan Yosifov 2004-12-07 05:29:11 UTC]

>Also I don't understand your comment "valuable communication resources." What >resources?

I mean that miss-comunication is bad for gentoo. 

>And the answer to your question of where to post is, wherever you want.

I dont want just to post , for the sake of posting it. I want to post where it will be read by those who can fix it / take action.

>Even the effort involved in ignoring threads is nontrivial, once you've got 500 >messages on 100 threads every day, and you only care about 5 threads a week.

Perhaps , but is it better to miss things you care about ?

[Comment 3 Donnie Berkholz (RETIRED) 2004-12-07 08:21:29 UTC]

I'd be missing things I cared about with your suggestion -- things I currently don't miss, because I'm subscribed to the relevant lists. If there isn't enough time to sift through useless threads, I'd never find the good ones.

[Comment 4 Ivan Yosifov 2004-12-08 00:45:38 UTC]

It appears that the pruposed mailing list consolidation will indeed bring more problems than it will solve. Closing the bug as WONTFIX.

Ivan Yosifov.