[openstack-dev] [all][swg] per-project "Business only" moderated mailing lists

Doug Hellmann doug at doughellmann.com
Mon Feb 27 20:43:12 UTC 2017


Excerpts from Clint Byrum's message of 2017-02-27 09:35:21 -0800:
> Excerpts from Dean Troyer's message of 2017-02-27 09:32:09 -0600:
> > On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 3:31 AM, Clint Byrum <clint at fewbar.com> wrote:
> > > This is not for users who only want to see some projects. That is a well
> > > understood space and the mailman filtering does handle it. This is for
> > > those who want to monitor the overall health of the community, address
> > > issues with cross-project specs, or participate in so many projects it
> > > makes little sense to spend time filtering.
> > 
> > Monday morning and the caffiene is just beginning to reach my brain,
> > but this seems counter-intuitive to me.  I consider myself someone who
> > _does_ want to keep in touch with the majority of the community, and
> > breaking things into N additional mailing lists makes that harder, not
> > easier.  I _do_ include core team updates, mascots, social meetings in
> > that set of things to pay a little attention to here, especially
> > around summit/PTG/Forum/etc times.
> > 
> > I've seen a couple of descriptions of who this proposal is not
> > intended to address, who exactly is expected to benefit from more
> > mailing lists?
> > 
> 
> Thanks for your reply. The proposed change is meant to benefit
> readers of openstack-dev who do not have access to, or ability with,
> sup/procmail/sieve/IMAP/etc., but do want to be able to be able to keep
> up with the general flow of discussion in openstack-dev. We had a room
> full of 10 or so cross-project minded folks, and only 3 of us felt that
> we could keep up with the discussion threads that we even care about, much
> less those that we might care about, but don't have time to even evaluate.
> 
> The idea would simply be that those directly involved in a team wouldn't
> mind subscribing to a few more ML's to get relevant information about
> the day to day workings of a team, but that for most people openstack-dev
> would be sufficient.
> 
> The response to the suggestion tells me that we don't have agreement that
> there is a problem. Perhaps those of us in the SWG room at the time were
> simply falling victim to a small sample size and anecdotal data.
> 
> So, I'll ask more generally: do you believe that the single openstack-dev
> mailing list is working fine and we should change nothing? If not, what
> problems has it created for you? 

As a person who sends a lot of process-driven email to this list,
it is not working for my needs to communicate with others.

Over the past few cycles when I was the release PTL, I always had
a couple of PTLs say there was too much email on this list for them
to read, and that they had not read my instructions for managing
releases. That resulted in us having to train folks at the last
minute, remind them of deadlines, deal with them missing deadlines,
and otherwise increased the release team's workload.

It is possible the situation will improve now that the automation
work is mostly complete and we expect to see fewer significant
changes in the release workflow. That still leaves quite a few
people regularly surprised by deadlines, though.

Doug

> Let's refrain from making suggestions about solutions until we've agreed
> on any problems (or the lack thereof, hopefully?)
> 



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