Friendly suggestion to make the dev-list readable again

[Christofer Dutz <ch...@c-ware.de>]

Hi,

while reviewing your projects activity as part of my board duties, I came to notice, that the dev-list is in an almost unusable state.

The vast majority of all emails are auto-generated emails from GitHub.

The way the replication is setup per default makes these emails impossible to follow and display in any email client I tried to read it on.

I do see that you seem to have tried sort of managing this by deflecting the mails to another mailing list, however I think this might be the wrong approach as it doesn’t help following the project.

After a lot of persuasion Infra introduced a new feature into the .asf.yml to allow custom templates for these auto-generated emails.

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/Git+-+.asf.yaml+features#Git.asf.yamlfeatures-CustomsubjectlinesforGitHubevents

In the PLC4X Project we used these settings to drastically reformat the subject lines of all GitHub emails.

https://github.com/apache/plc4x/blob/develop/.asf.yaml#L62

With this we can now read the start of the title in typical columnar layouted email clients as well on phones and the clients are able to do correct threading.

Perhaps worth discussing to adopt these or similar changes.

The way the list is currently, I doubt anyone is reading it and it makes it impossible for outsiders to get started … well … and it makes it hard for the board to execute it’s oversight.

As I said in the subject … it’s not an order to change anything, but a friendly suggestion.

Chris

Re: Friendly suggestion to make the dev-list readable again

[Hans Van Akelyen <ha...@gmail.com>]

 Hi Chris,

Thanks for the interesting pointers! I also had the feeling the list was
becoming unreadable and would scare away our committers to actively follow
it as most of it is indeed “spam” that can be tracked using other systems
(Mainly GitHub). I thought our only option would be to mitigate the problem
to a different list.

I will take a look at the PLC4X setup, first test it in the issues list and
if it works as expected we can bring those conversations back to the dev
list.

Kr,
Hans



On 15 February 2023 at 12:43:57, Christofer Dutz (christofer.dutz@c-ware.de)
wrote:

Hi,

while reviewing your projects activity as part of my board duties, I came
to notice, that the dev-list is in an almost unusable state.

The vast majority of all emails are auto-generated emails from GitHub.

The way the replication is setup per default makes these emails impossible
to follow and display in any email client I tried to read it on.

I do see that you seem to have tried sort of managing this by deflecting
the mails to another mailing list, however I think this might be the wrong
approach as it doesn’t help following the project.

After a lot of persuasion Infra introduced a new feature into the .asf.yml
to allow custom templates for these auto-generated emails.

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/Git+-+.asf.yaml+features#Git.asf.yamlfeatures-CustomsubjectlinesforGitHubevents

In the PLC4X Project we used these settings to drastically reformat the
subject lines of all GitHub emails.

https://github.com/apache/plc4x/blob/develop/.asf.yaml#L62

With this we can now read the start of the title in typical columnar
layouted email clients as well on phones and the clients are able to do
correct threading.

Perhaps worth discussing to adopt these or similar changes.

The way the list is currently, I doubt anyone is reading it and it makes it
impossible for outsiders to get started … well … and it makes it hard for
the board to execute it’s oversight.

As I said in the subject … it’s not an order to change anything, but a
friendly suggestion.

Chris