My 2 cents (I know, you were dying to know how I feel ;):
I want to be a part of this (and many other) communities, and that
means keeping up to date with the discussions that happen for a given
project.
To that end, mailing lists work, and forums do not. It's nice to be
able to filter messages but that's not a deal breaker for me. What
is a deal breaker for me is how much time I have to spend going
through all of the communications (discussions, commits, wiki
updates, whatever). Hell, if someone would email the irc transcripts
for any project I'm a part of, I'd say "thank you, may I have another".
For me, it's about time management, with mailing lists, it's as
simple as reading the subject and deleting the entire thread with the
push of 1 key, or if I'm interested, I don't have to hit anything, I
just glance down to the reading pane and read until I'm satisfied
that either:
a) I can help, so I hit reply
b) I can help, but no time at the moment, delete
c) I can't help, and I'm not interested anyway, delete
d) I can't help, but I am interested, keep it until the thread
completes, and if there is a solution, save it
So, I don't care about the implementation as long as it meets my
requirements, otherwise I simply must opt out. I hope that doesn't
happen with my favorite community, Struts.
Thanks
--
James Mitchell
EdgeTech, Inc.
http://edgetechservices.net/
678.910.8017
Skype: jmitchtx
On Jan 17, 2006, at 2:14 PM, Sean Schofield wrote:
I agree with Ted about the importance of mailing lists. Mailing lists
are the "Apache Way." The only time I have used off-llist
communication is during an infrastructure move where we needed to
rapidly complete several steps in a short period of time. Even then
the basic outline of work was agreed to in advance on the mailing
list.
Mailing lists may seem outdated but they are the lifeblood of the ASF
and they continue to serve us well. There may be more rapid ways of
communicating (phone calls and internet chat come to mind) but these
are exclusionary. The community is world wide and people have day
jobs. It takes a little longer to hash things out over email but
everyone gets to participate this way.
The result is a single archive that is publicly searchable and
contains all relevant decisions (no matter how trivial) in one place.
My .02
Sean
On 1/17/06, Patrick Lightbody <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Ted,
I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but you seem to imply that I
don't have any experience with this sort of stuff. I do.
We too at OpenSymphony use mailing lists quite heavily (as does
every other decent open source project out there). However, as
technologies like RSS have grown more popular, we adapted. Now we
get our wiki changes and CVS changes through RSS (Confluence and
FishEye both provide RSS feeds). We also offer the option of email
messages, but that is up to the individual.
Conversations still continue around wiki changes and commits. For
those that subscribe to the mailing lists, they simply forward the
message to the dev list. For those that don't, they simply post a
new message asking, "John, can you explain why you changed
Foo.java yesterday?".
Try to understand where I'm coming from: the wiki and commit
changes aren't interesting to me (I don't have time to look
through any of them). Not just for Struts, but for WebWork too.
Instead, I do weekly reviews. With Struts, I just delete those
messages as they come in. And when I look at the forums:
http://forums.opensymphony.com/forum.jspa?forumID=34
I see "NO NOT REPLY" and "[Struts Wiki]", making it just as
difficult for me to keep up with the other conversations. I didn't
mean to imply that those messages sometime don't spur a
conversation, but pragmatically 99% of the chatter I've seen does
not come from them.
I definitely understand where you are coming from, and I hope you
can see where I'm coming from. Often when people have different
work behaviors, the best bet is to provide more options. This can
be done by somehow allowing individuals to opt out of those
generated emails. I hope we can do something about this.
Patrick
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted via Jive Forums
http://forums.opensymphony.com/thread.jspa?
threadID=14616&messageID=28843#28843
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
