Dennis Lundberg wrote:
Henri Yandell wrote:
<snip/>
We have a very noisy set of mailing lists. Need to ask how the Jive
forum is going for Struts (I think I heard that was in place?).
Watching how the Maven-dev move to separate lists for commits, jira,
dev, ci goes.
Here are some views on mailing list noise from someone who has only
recently become a commons committer. I am also somewhat involved in
Maven without being a committer.
I think that the sheer volume of traffic on commons-dev is a big hurdle
for people wanting to get more involved with commons. This is from my
own experience. The lists that we have today are suitable for users
(commons-user) and committers (commons-dev). As i see it, there is a
couple of more steps in between, in the natural progression from user to
committer.
1. Someone becomes interested in using a commons component, we'll take
commons-lang as an example. The user starts using it and maybe has a few
questions, so the user joins the user-list.
2. The user realizes that this is good stuff and starts to wonder how
they accomplish this, so the user joins the dev-list. Note: this is
where it usually ends because the user can't handle the volume of mails,
so he/she just unsubscribes from the list and continues to be a happy user.
3. If we had a list where discussions on organization, methodology and
design issues were available the above user might become more interested
in the Apache way and stay if the traffic was reasonable. This would be
the current commons-dev list without some extra baggage, see more below.
4. As the user becomes an involved user he or she might want to create
an occasional patch for StringUtils or something. The involved user
files an issue, attaches a patch and feels warn and fuzzy inside when
the patch gets accepted. The involved user wants this feeling to last
and joins the issues-list, where all bugzilla and jira issues are sent,
looking for more to do.
5. The involved user is starting to wonder how those committer do their
coding and joins the commits-list to see what everyone is doing and how
they do it.
6. Time passes and the person gets more involved and is elected as
committer. This means more responsibility and the person now has to
worry about things like CI (GUMP) and subscribes to the ci-list or
build-list (haven't got a good name for this one)
Where does that leave us? If we create a couple of more lists I believe
that we would attract more involved users. So my suggestion is to have
these lists:
commons-user
commons-dev (includes the wiki stuff)
commons-issues
commons-commits
commons-ci (perhaps with a better name)
Putting some (approximate) numbers on the traffic to make things
clearer. The number of mails so far during 2006 for the proposed lists:
563 commons-user
1396 commons-dev (excluding the new lists below)
132 commons-wiki (I think this can be included in commons-dev)
861 commons-issues
710 commons-commits
370 commons-ci (this is GUMP)
To put this into context, here are the numbers for the current list setup:
563 commons-user
3469 commons-dev
--
Dennis Lundberg
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