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

Thierry Carrez thierry at openstack.org
Tue Feb 28 10:25:24 UTC 2017


Clint Byrum wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> The problem above is really the krux of it. Whether or not you can keep
> up with the mailing list can be an unknown, unknown. Even now, those
> who can't actually handle the mailing list traffic are in fact likely
> missing this thread about whether or not people can handle the mailing
> list traffic (credit fungi for pointing out this irony to me on IRC).

Right, the main issue (for me) is that there is no unique way to reach
out to people that you're 100% sure they will read. For some the miracle
solution will be a personal email, for some it will be an IRC ping, for
some it will be a Twitter private message. There is no 100% sure
solution, and everyone prioritizes differently. The burden of reaching
out and making sure the message was acknowledged is on the person who
sends the message, and that just doesn't scale past 50 teams. That
includes release team communications to PTLs, but also things like
election nomination deadlines and plenty of other things.

The unique -dev list is pretty good for things that are generally good
to know, but also OK to miss. It's missing the target for things that
are useless beyond a given group (not "generally good to know") -- hence
your proposal of -business lists. It's also missing the target for
things that you can't afford to miss. For those things we used the
-announce list for a while. We could ask again that *everyone* upstream
must read -announce and prioritize it...

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)



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