On Friday, October 25, 2002, at 09:12 AM, Sander Striker wrote:
[ ] One mother general@ list, with specific breakouts when needed [X] Per-concept mailing lists (define "concept" however)
the only way that the jakarta-commons dev mailing list can function is through the 'prefix rule' that is, all posts should be prefixed. in the jakarta-commons we have well-established components all of which are peers.
so, you prefix with the component name eg. 'subject: [digester] how about a new release?'.
it would not be possible to cope with the traffic with this rule. (indeed,
i don't think that i'll be able to cope with the traffic on this list for much longer without being able to filter on subject prefix.)
i'd like to suggest this rule is adopted here with a slight variation. we try concept prefixes (as well as component ones). breakouts from the commons-dev happen because it's easy to spot which components are generating a lot of traffic. when a component becomes too popular, it's moved to it's own list. but this also ensures that this list will be successful since it'll have a critical mass of email posts.
prefixing is a more flexible approach than simply creating concept based mailing lists. popular concepts would be easy to identify and new concepts would be easy to create. of course, we'd need a list of official concepts but that'd be easier to maintain than physical mailing lists.
if we do go down the concept-based approach, i'd also like to see components broken out with their concepts. so if [http client] concept becomes to popular for the mother list, then components closely associated with the concept should be broken out as well.
- robert
