subbing lists to each other

[Dave Neary]

Hi Karsten,

On 08/14/2012 10:25 PM, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
> Anyone know what might happen if we subscribe the project mailing
> lists to arch@?

It'll work, but in general it's not a good idea. And if you have 
Reply-to mangling enabled it breaks.

> I know the "try to avoid duplicates" is set in Mailman. Will that cover?

Nope - that will only cover situations where you are emailing a list of 
which you are a member, I believe.

> The deal is, we must have one generic all-project mailing list. When
> we see there are more people subscribed to engine-devel@ than arch@,
> what should we think & do? Leave them alone in their corner?

My best advice is that you should have the general/central mailing list 
be so useful & high quality that everyone who needs to be there *wants* 
to be there.

I think the cross-posting, and the mailing lists with big cross-sections 
(I can't be the only person signed up to infra, users, arch, board and 
announce) makes it hard to figure out which list is appropriate for a 
message. The website discussions, for example, are particularly 
troublesome, because they touch our users, but there is a need to 
include board, and we really want the feedback of the core developers, 
and changes to the website affect the infra team.

The best suggestion I have, in that case, is to consult Users about 
where the website is lacking, make a proposal & have a discussion based 
on that on arch, take the results of that to board for approval/comment, 
and then talk to infra about the practicalities of making the changes. 
But including all 4 groups in all the discussion just makes it harder to 
follow and less useful for everyone.

> How can we be integrated if we don't have all project people on one
> central mailing list?

We don't need all of the project people, just the "important" ones.

> On the other hand, everyone on engine-devel@ doesn't have to know
> about the cross-project materials relevant to arch@ if they don't want
> to - I respect that right. But that requires other people on
> engine-devel@ to pass along *all* key information. Is that fair?

I think that there will be some collateral damage during a transition 
period, if we decide to discourage cross-posting and try to formalise 
the goals of each list, and what's on-topic there. At some point, 
someone on engine-devel will be unhappy that something was discussed and 
decided on arch, and they didn't hear about it. The ironic solution to 
that problem is to tighten the scope of all the lists, and cross-post 
the new proposed scope to them all :-)

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards Team, Red Hat
Phone: +33 9 50 71 55 62