As a frequent emailer of dev@, I'll admit that it's often very difficult to figure out if I should be emailing user@ or dev@, and typically just chose dev@ because it seems more likely to get an answer there. Having clearer guidelines around what is a "dev" topic would be very useful to better guide people towards the correct list.
An example here was my recent email about schemas. [1] Should this have gone to users@? I count myself as a "developer" so I feel like it fits into "developer and contributor discussions", but I can certainly also see how it would fit into "general discussions" for users@ as well. [1] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r881ab4d0ccbc7dc2e8c478f9b68b18b313f3740b419fdf7e91a17a83%40%3Cdev.beam.apache.org%3E On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 2:52 PM Ahmet Altay <al...@google.com> wrote: > > > On Wed, Mar 10, 2021 at 11:16 AM Alexey Romanenko < > aromanenko....@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> >> What do you think should be the right behaviour for managing such emails? >>> Forward this email to user@ (and remove dev@ address from copy) and ask >>> politely to continue a discussion there? I tried it several times but >>> sometimes it happened that discussion was "forked” and continued in two >>> different lists which is even worse, imho. >> >> >> I like your proposal but I do share the same concern of forked threads. >> One suggestion, instead of forking the thread we can ask users to ask on >> user@ list next time and still answer the question in the original >> thread. Hopefully that can reinforce good habits over time. >> >> >> Agree with asking and not to fork, since it usually won’t help. >> >> Anything else? What do you believe should work better in such cases >>> (maybe some experience for other projects)? >> >> >> I wonder if there is a reason for people to ask on dev@ instead of user@? >> Web site instructions look pretty clear to me. There is a good amount of >> activity and engagement on user@ list as well. I am not sure about why >> users pick one list over another. >> >> >> Maybe we need to make it even more clear on web page that dev@ list is >> _only_ for dev-related questions, that are supposed to have any >> relationship with project development in any sense (new features/ >> infrastructure/ bugs/ testing/ documentation/ etc) and provide some >> examples for both of the lists? >> > > +1 this makes sense to me. And reading the website again "review proposed > design ideas on dev@" might imply that you can bring your design ideas > about your own use cases/issues to the dev list. > >
