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Posted to dev@commons.apache.org by Elliotte Harold <el...@metalab.unc.edu> on 2005/05/10 12:17:37 UTC
Meta-issue: multiple mailig lists
Is there any chance or interest in splitting this mailing list up into
multiple mailing lists, one per subproject? I (and I suspect many other
subscribers) am interested in a couple of the subprojects, but most of
the traffic is fairly irrelevant to me.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu
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Re: Meta-issue: multiple mailig lists
Posted by Simon Kitching <sk...@apache.org>.
On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 08:38 +0200, Mattias J wrote:
> Would it be possible to set up the svn commit mails to include this in *the
> beginning* of the subject line? As I said, all my e-mail client shows is
> (for example) "svn commit: r169326 -".
This is a nice idea if it can be done. If you can figure out how to
configure subversion to do this, and write a simple set of instructions
that someone with infrastructure access can follow to set this up, I'll
vote in favour of doing this. I'll even request the appropriate access
in order to install it myself (if infrastructure will grant it).
Note that there is AFAIK only one subversion repository for the whole of
the ASF, so the solution must somehow avoid messing with stuff not
related to jakarta-commons. However as only commits to commons are
mailed to commons-dev, I presume there's some sort of filtering on this
order occurring already.
>
>
> Simon Kitching wrote:
> >Getting messages that aren't associated with a particular project could be
> >done by simply filtering *out* the projects you aren't interested in
> >rather than filtering *in* the ones you are.
>
> Yes, that is probably the best idea. "if subject contains
> '[uninteresting-project]' or '/proper/uninteresting-project/' move to Trash".
> Still does not help on the unclassified issue mails though.
If all the mails associated with "uninteresting" projects are filtered
out, then you end up with interesting projects + non-project-related
emails....
I agree that the volume of commons-dev can be daunting, and discouraging
to people who are interested in only a few projects. However the obvious
cure (separate lists per project) is worse than the disease; this is not
just my opinion but also those who set up this system in the first
place.
>>From inspecting
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-commons-dev&r=1&w=2
it appears that around 1600 mails per month go to this list,
which is about 50 per day. Not unmanageable (particularly as they can
easily be filtered into a "commons-dev" folder by basic filtering), but
certainly a nuisance.
If anyone can come up with a *concrete* proposal to solve this issue, ie
(a) allow *most* commons developers to receive all emails
(b) allow newbies to receive only mails for one project
then please put forward your ideas. Note, however, that they must be
*tested* and *workable* ideas, not just general hand-waviness or they
are unlikely to get much attention. It's the old OSS philosophy: if you
have an itch, then *you* scratch it :-)
The problem is not so significant on commons-user; the volume of
messages there is really quite low so I see no great need to have
per-project user lists. Volume is pretty steady at around 400 per month;
that's around a dozen a day. And digests are available I think...
Cheers,
Simon
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Re: Meta-issue: multiple mailig lists
Posted by Craig McClanahan <cr...@gmail.com>.
On 5/10/05, Mattias J <mj...@expertsystem.se> wrote:
> Simon Kitching wrote:
> [snip]
> Elliotte Harold wrote:
> >I suspect some of the less active lists may be so primarily because few
> >people care about those projects enough to wade through all the projects
> >they don't care about. Having separate lists might help the smaller
> >communities to grow a bit.
>
> That is a point. The volume of the dev-list might actually make people
> reluctant to subscribing to it at all.
On the other hand, I would assert that we commons-dev folks (including
me ... I +1'd this too) screwed up when we encouraged the
commons-httpclient developers to go form their own list to reduce the
traffic on commons-dev. Fortunately for httpclient that wasn't fatal
to their community development efforts, but it illustrates one of the
intangible benefits of all the Commons projects sharing a common dev
and user list ... a primary resource for adding new interested parties
is people seeing messages for projects that they weren't originally
interested in, but a comment or two piqued their interest.
Put another way, a big part of the Apache culture is meritocracy --
and the ability of an individual to figure out how to use mail filters
to ignore dev list stuff they don't care about is a useful indicator
of cluefulness :-).
Craig
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Re: Meta-issue: multiple mailig lists
Posted by Mattias J <mj...@expertsystem.se>.
Simon Kitching wrote:
>Often I have struck a problem, and been given advice from committers on
>quite different projects.
So an additional common list - which forwards to all the separate ones - is
still a good idea.
Simon Kitching wrote:
>Every email is supposed to contain the name of the subproject in
>square-brackets, eg
> [foo] why did the chicken cross the road?
>so that filtering is reasonably easy to do.
Would it be possible to set up the svn commit mails to include this in *the
beginning* of the subject line? As I said, all my e-mail client shows is
(for example) "svn commit: r169326 -".
Simon Kitching wrote:
>Getting messages that aren't associated with a particular project could be
>done by simply filtering *out* the projects you aren't interested in
>rather than filtering *in* the ones you are.
Yes, that is probably the best idea. "if subject contains
'[uninteresting-project]' or '/proper/uninteresting-project/' move to Trash".
Still does not help on the unclassified issue mails though.
Elliotte Harold wrote:
>I suspect some of the less active lists may be so primarily because few
>people care about those projects enough to wade through all the projects
>they don't care about. Having separate lists might help the smaller
>communities to grow a bit.
That is a point. The volume of the dev-list might actually make people
reluctant to subscribing to it at all.
Mario Ivankovits wrote:
>Mattias J wrote:
>>Then what would be high traffic to you?
>Take a look at the hibernate forum. This is really high traffic.
A forum is a whole different story than a mailing list.
Mario Ivankovits wrote:
>Mattias J wrote:
>>If it was not for all the commits and bug/issue mails there would be no
>>problem. But for those, it's often a lot harder to tell whether this is
>>interesting for you without opening the e-mail (especially since my mail
>>client insists on truncating the subject after "svn commit: rNNNNNN -"...)
>In fact sometimes I dive into those mails to learn.
In that case, subscribe to them all!
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Re: Meta-issue: multiple mailig lists
Posted by Elliotte Harold <el...@metalab.unc.edu>.
Simon Kitching wrote:
> And quite often a commons project has only 1 or 2 regular committers. If
> it were on its own list, then there's no oversight of that project by
> the general commons community. A project could die and rot without
> anyone noticing.
>
Perhaps what's needed then is a separate commons-dev list and then
individual commons-users lists?
I suspect some of the less active lists may be so primarily because few
people care about those projects enough to wade through all the projects
they don't care about. Having separate lists might help the smaller
communities to grow a bit.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu
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Re: Meta-issue: multiple mailig lists
Posted by Simon Kitching <sk...@apache.org>.
Hi Elliotte,
On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 06:17 -0400, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Is there any chance or interest in splitting this mailing list up into
> multiple mailing lists, one per subproject? I (and I suspect many other
> subscribers) am interested in a couple of the subprojects, but most of
> the traffic is fairly irrelevant to me.
>
Well, the current setup is very deliberate. Commons is meant to be a
single community, with many shared conventions and tools.
Often I have struck a problem, and been given advice from committers on
quite different projects.
And quite often a commons project has only 1 or 2 regular committers. If
it were on its own list, then there's no oversight of that project by
the general commons community. A project could die and rot without
anyone noticing.
Every email is supposed to contain the name of the subproject in
square-brackets, eg
[foo] why did the chicken cross the road?
so that filtering is reasonably easy to do.
Getting messages that aren't associated with a particular project could
be done by simply filtering *out* the projects you aren't interested in
rather than filtering *in* the ones you are. Ok, there are about 50
projects so that's a moderately long filter, but only a couple of
projects are added per year so keeping such a filter up-to-date isn't
that hard.
Yes, the filtering approach is a nuisance for people on low-bandwidth,
as the entire set of mails gets downloaded then most discarded - at
least with my email client. Presumably as the filter criteria is on the
subject, and email headers can be downloaded without bodies, it's
possible to filter mail without downloading it. I don't know how one
would set that up, though.
Note that many "generic" emails go to general@jakarta.apache.org rather
than commons-dev@jakarta.apache.org.
So in summary, I'm definitely against *replacing* the existing commons
shared list with separate lists. Perhaps some "gateway" could be set up
where the filtering rules split stuff up into multiple lists, so people
could subscribe to separate lists if they really want to. Posts to those
lists would be forwarded to the commons-dev list, with the subject line
auto-updated to include the project name. Sounds doable, but a fair bit
of work to set up. Apache's infrastructure team are already overloaded,
so I don't see them being willing/available to tackle this anytime soon
though. Of course this setup doesn't have to be hosted at apache!
Cheers,
Simon
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Re: Meta-issue: multiple mailig lists
Posted by Mario Ivankovits <ma...@ops.co.at>.
Mattias J wrote:
>> I do have an easy overlook whats new in other projects, the traffic
>> is not that high.
>
> Then what would be high traffic to you?
Take a look at the hibernate forum. This is really high traffic.
> If it was not for all the commits and bug/issue mails there would be
> no problem. But for those, it's often a lot harder to tell whether
> this is interesting for you without opening the e-mail (especially
> since my mail client insists on truncating the subject after "svn
> commit: rNNNNNN -"...)
In fact sometimes I dive into those mails to learn.
>> Why not create a e-mail filter to get only those mails you are
>> interested in?
> I planned to, but haven't decided what to filter on.
I my case I filter on "vfs" in the subject, but I admit this is not
always possible. And ok, I have no problems with commit and bug mails as
especially the bug mails sometime also contains discussions like a
mailinglist thread.
---
Mario
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Re: Meta-issue: multiple mailig lists
Posted by Mattias J <mj...@expertsystem.se>.
Elliotte Harold wrote:
>>Is there any chance or interest in splitting this mailing list up into
>>multiple mailing lists, one per subproject?
+1
+ 1 common mailing list (commons-common :-) ) - for mails like this.
Mario Ivankovits wrote:
>I do have an easy overlook whats new in other projects, the traffic is not
>that high.
Then what would be high traffic to you?
If it was not for all the commits and bug/issue mails there would be no
problem. But for those, it's often a lot harder to tell whether this is
interesting for you without opening the e-mail (especially since my mail
client insists on truncating the subject after "svn commit: rNNNNNN -"...)
>Why not create a e-mail filter to get only those mails you are interested in?
I planned to, but haven't decided what to filter on. Apart from the
subprojects of interest, I want the general mail (as of above). So maybe
"subject contains 'sub-project' [or 'sub-project2' or 'sub-project3' ...]
or (subject does not contain '[' and ']' and subject does not contain 'svn
commit')"?
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Re: Meta-issue: multiple mailig lists
Posted by Mario Ivankovits <ma...@ops.co.at>.
Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Is there any chance or interest in splitting this mailing list up into
> multiple mailing lists, one per subproject? I (and I suspect many
> other subscribers) am interested in a couple of the subprojects, but
> most of the traffic is fairly irrelevant to me.
I feel very comfortable with how it is currently.
I do have an easy overlook whats new in other projects, the traffic is
not that high.
This is true for commons-dev, maybe for commons-user it might be a
different story.
Why not create a e-mail filter to get only those mails you are
interested in?
---
Mario
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