On 04/17/2011 05:16 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 2:20 PM, fantasai<[email protected]>wrote:
I'd like to point out that m.d.platform is already too high-traffic for
me to follow closely. A very high percentage of the posts are things I
either don't understand and therefore don't care about (60%+) or are
irrelevant to me (20%+). Within m.d.t.layout, I read 95%+.
Can't you just skim subject lines? That's what I do in almost every mailing
list I'm subscribed to --- www-style, public-html, whatwg, webkit-dev,
mercurial-devel, etc etc. Who still has the luxury of being able to
subscribe only to lists where every message interests them?
Sure, but the higher the percentage of posts that don't interest me,
the less interested I am in spending my time skimming them, and the
less likely I am to catch threads that have any relevance to me.
I very rarely check whatwg's list these days, because these days it's
95% not interesting to someone who doesn't care about scripting. If I
catch a thread that's relevant, it's because I was bored that week and
happened to find something interesting in my whatwg folder. But you
can't count on me to notice anything: it's all incidental. I am still
subscribed, because I know there is relevant stuff flying by every now
and again.
My previous reincarnation as a volunteer layout QA would almost certainly
be lost in m.d.platform.
What do you mean exactly?
I would be so far out of my depth that it wouldn't make sense to even
try following along. Release management, APIs, performance graphs --
none of these meant anything to me.
I followed along in n.p.m.layout because it was my area. Some of the
discussions I understood and could contribute to, and others I didn't
because they talked about how the code should work and not about what
it should accomplish. But I knew they were relevant to my area so I'd
try to read some of them anyway, and if nothing else I learned a bit
about who did what. The list was slow enough that I could keep up. But
if I subscribe to a high-traffic list and 95% of it is incomprehensible,
that's not really encouraging me to stick around or pay attention.
IIRC, n.p.m.qa was mostly incomprehensible to me, so I didn't follow it.
n.p.m.layout was, so I did.
Scanning the list, the only threads in the past 3 months whose subjects
would have made any sense to me as layout QA are the one on UA strings
and the one on good first bugs. So m.d.platform would have struck me as
obviously not the right place for someone like me to hang out.
Which is fine. That's not what m.d.platform is for -- it's for platform
engineers to broadcast to each other. And I, not being a platform
engineer, would not have belonged there.
~fantasai
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