On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 11:10 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnie...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen wrote: > >> Perhaps someone here would prefer to use my gist when >> redirecting people with "user questions" away from this list, or >> inspire them to write better bug reports. > > This won't come as a surprise given what I said at Git Merge: I'd > rather we don't redirect people with user questions away from this > list. The current volume has been pleasant and manageable. >
I see your point. And I do see this working out well for freshly created open-source projects with low traffic mailing lists. However, this is a high traffic list, and that has the disadvantage of blending user questions into a majority of patch- and expert discussion. This makes it (a) harder for the user needing help to recognise existing contexts, and (b) harder for "amateurs" like myself to spot other users that I can easily help out. And then there is the whole Majordomo blocking emails for various reasons issue, HTML being one of several, ref <http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html>. Here are some examples of when we tried helping people on the Google Groups user list with sending mail to this list: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/git-users/iiNBWq3_uUs/ke2eDiumPEsJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/git-users/eT_UDv7TpjY/CfYE8jHQ_vYJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/git-users/qibnKchBf6I/UPtv1_Ctxm4J https://groups.google.com/d/msg/git-users/4KXBwBXNd5Q/4yuBELlc8lUJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/git-users/Tl141kCJ45Q/-ToWHYfdmXEJ And then there is the mental hurdle: I mean, I still consider it intimidating to send mails to this list. A new user could in some cases be terrified. My personal reference are Apache projects: they always have one dev-list, and a separate user-list. The key there is that the user-list is adjacent to the dev-list, and all the devs (who are interested) monitor the user-list closely. So I'm historically/personally biased towards the dev/user split. Perhaps you see this differently, and it is up to you (the consensus) to choose what kind of traffic you want, or which behaviour you want to discourage/encourage. I'll also note the trend of how modern users are becoming less and less users of email, turning to web-based forums instead for assistance, and I enjoy the fact that Google Groups is an alternative that offers seamless web- and email-based interaction. To summarize: I think that usability problems of Majordomo have lead you into a situation where you could consider embracing a user-list like the one found at Google Groups. Unless, of course, you believe that the users that make it through here are a good representation of your user-base, and they provide just enough input for you to steer the project forward. The rest of the users in need of help, and I think that is a vast majority, will find another outlet. My own motivation is that I want all Git users to figure out their problems as soon and as efficient as possible, and directing them to the Google Group seems to be the best way IMHO. > I especially disagree with > > Generally speaking, Git has very few bugs, and if you're not > sure what you are doing, it's probably a user-issue, and not > an issue for the Git developers. > > User issues are an issue for git developers. The hardest part of > making git work well is getting it to match how humans work, not > getting it to be technically correct or theoretically bug free. > > So if I were writing it, I'd drop everything up to "If you believe > you've found a bug in Git for Windows". I've removed that sentence, and reformulated the part below. I'll keep the link to the Groups list and StackOverflow for reasons mentioned earlier. > Another alternate forum to point people to is #git on freenode. It is > reachable from https://webchat.freenode.net, so a person seeking quick > help doesn't even have to set up an IRC client. Thanks, I've added this. > It might be nice to add a note to the "If you can find no existing > discussions" paragraph: if there's been a previous discussion, it's > fine to raise the subject again. A good practice is to link to and > summarize the previous discussion so people can learn from what has > happened before. OK, added. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
