do you know enough about what (other) Bazaar developers are doing?

[James Westby]

On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 16:14 -0400, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> James Westby wrote:
> > I think we should hold off on this for as long as possible. Obviously
> > when that point is up for debate, and it may be that we've reached it.
> 
> I agree with that principle, but I think we may have reached that point.
> 
> I was sprinting last week, and it took me 'till today to catch up with
> the list. 

You probably pay more attention that me to most of the mail though.

>  I've heard of people unsubscribing from the ML due to its
> volume and now we hear from someone declaring "email bankruptcy" and
> marking all messages "read".

Yes, that is obviously bad. Would a user list do what these people
want though? Are they here for support, to provide support, and
to discuss that sort of thing, or to follow development?

If it's the latter then there is very little we can do, to follow
it you need to get most of these mails.

If we were to have the split then I would ask for three things:

  1. All developers subscribe to the users list. Helping out is
     important, but also seeing the issues people are running in
     to and seeing the things that they would like to be able
     to do are hugely important.

  2. We ask people who don't contribute code to still try and
     keep up with the development list to keep an eye on
     where things are going. I'm sure this will happen to some
     extent, and hopefully this will be the least important
     of the three due to the last one.

  3. Comments on new features, UI etc. are requested from the
     user list. It's important to get this feedback, and doing
     it during development keeps the implementation honest,
     and helps engender user engagement with the project.
     I would say this goes for when these discussions arise
     from reviews as well, but sometimes it's hard to split
     these bits from the code comments, and doing so would
     be more work.

We obviously wouldn't want point 3 to lead to the user list
being just as noisy as the list is currently.

A friend just pointed me to this:

http://list.org/mailman-member/node29.html

It's not that different from having separate lists as far as
I can tell, but it could be help number 3. It would mean that
discussion mails would go to everyone without much thought,
and it would be easier to switch from code review to wider
discussion by just removing MERGE from the subject, rather
than having to start cross posting things and tracking replies
in two places.

Thanks,

James