Mailing list scope proposal

[Dave Neary]

Hi all,

Over on infra@, we were having a discussion about whether it was best 
policy to subscribe lists to each other to help reduce the amount of 
cross-posting going on in the project (I for one find it a bit annoying 
to get 4 copies of a single email).

The answer to the technical question is that it's not, there are lots of 
good reasons to avoid subscribing lists to another mailing list, but 
that led to a discussion about whether we could tighten the scope of 
each of the lists, and reduce cross-posting that way, by making it 
clearer where people should be subscribed/where a topic is on- and 
off-topic.

So - here's my suggestion for that (and as per my suggestion, let's have 
this discussion here, and when we reach a consensus ask for the opinion 
of the board):

users@ - User issues - help, troubleshooting, configuration issues, 
sharing experiences, etc. Users at will have mostly technical users of 
oVirt or people in the process of installing it, plus some of the oVirt 
developers (but we'd like to encourage our more technical users to 
answer questions). The list could also serve as a gateway drug to 
contribution, and we should ask here for help for initiatives which do 
not require intimate knowledge of the code base - VDSM hooks, wiki 
editing, documentation drives, etc.

arch@ - rename to developers@ - This will be the key developer mailing 
list for oVirt, the place where we discuss project-wide changes, the 
roadmap for future versions, release planning, where people can perhaps 
propose patches for discussion, and where any issue affecting the 
developer governance of the project will be discussed.

board@ - Issues related to the non-technical governance of the project 
(ie things which require board approval). In the case of the website 
redesign, for example, a final design, discussed beforehand on 
developers@, would be submitted to board@ for approval.

infra@ - issues related to the management of oVirt infrastructure - web 
services, developer infrastructure, etc.

vdsm-devel, node-devel, engine-devel, *-devel: Low-traffic lists related 
to the specific implementation issues of the individual components.

In this schema, if you want to talk to the developers, you email 
developers@ - if you have a suggestion specific to vdsm, you might 
contact developers@ or vdsm-devel@ - but not both. Any mailing list 
thread to vdsm-devel@ which requires feedback from the maintainers of 
other projects should move to developers@ once that's ascertained.

How does that sound? Does anyone have other/better suggestions?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat
Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13