I think that unfortunately mailing lists don't scale well. This one has thousands of subscribers with different interests and levels of experience. For any given person, most messages will be irrelevant. I also find that a lot of questions on user@ are not well-asked, aren't an SSCCE ( http://sscce.org/), not something most people are going to bother replying to even if they could answer. I almost entirely ignore user@ because there are higher-priority channels like PRs to deal with, that already have hundreds of messages per day. This is why little of it gets an answer -- too noisy.
We have to have official mailing lists, in any event, to have some official channel for things like votes and announcements. It's not wrong to ask questions on user@ of course, but a lot of the questions I see could have been answered with research of existing docs or looking at the code. I think that given the scale of the list, it's not wrong to assert that this is sort of a prerequisite for asking thousands of people to answer one's question. But we can't enforce that. The situation will get better to the extent people ask better questions, help other people ask better questions, and answer good questions. I'd encourage anyone feeling this way to try to help along those dimensions. On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 11:32 AM assaf.mendelson <assaf.mendel...@rsa.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I know this is a little off topic but I wanted to raise an issue about > handling questions in the mailing list (this is true both for the user > mailing list and the dev but since there are other options such as stack > overflow for user questions, this is more problematic in dev). > > Let’s say I ask a question (as I recently did). Unfortunately this was > during spark summit in Europe so probably people were busy. In any case no > one answered. > > The problem is, that if no one answers very soon, the question will almost > certainly remain unanswered because new messages will simply drown it. > > > > This is a common issue not just for questions but for any comment or idea > which is not immediately picked up. > > > > I believe we should have a method of handling this. > > Generally, I would say these types of things belong in stack overflow, > after all, the way it is built is perfect for this. More seasoned spark > contributors and committers can periodically check out unanswered questions > and answer them. > > The problem is that stack overflow (as well as other targets such as the > databricks forums) tend to have a more user based orientation. This means > that any spark internal question will almost certainly remain unanswered. > > > > I was wondering if we could come up with a solution for this. > > > > Assaf. > > > > ------------------------------ > View this message in context: Handling questions in the mailing lists > <http://apache-spark-developers-list.1001551.n3.nabble.com/Handling-questions-in-the-mailing-lists-tp19690.html> > Sent from the Apache Spark Developers List mailing list archive > <http://apache-spark-developers-list.1001551.n3.nabble.com/> at > Nabble.com. >
