Hi, Susan
The birt dev mailing list has been useful to the birt
committers. I vote for not changing it.
The check in messages
and daily build status messages are important information for contributors who
want to keep up with birt development.
With that said, mine
is only one vote. Let's hear from other
committers.
wenfeng
-----Original
Message-----
From: "Susan Cline" <home4slc@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To:
"birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx" <birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 1/30/07 5:07
PM
Subject: Re: [birt-dev] Thoughts about the mailing lists and
newsgroup
Hi Wenfeng,
I'm glad to hear you like the idea of
additional topics/contents on the mailing list. However, I'm still
thinking that two mailing lists would enable greater community
involvement. Let me try to explain further, and add proposed mailing
list names to clarify their purpose;
Mailing List A: birt-commits or
birt-checkins
checkins, build status, updates, API changes, BPS
announcements, wiki additions/change notices
(Other than BPS announcements ..
and maybe these should be moved to Mailing List B, it seems as though most of
these types of posts are mostly automatically generated? Maybe this
is another way to easily divide the content?)
To re-iterate contributors,
committers, and community members would not use this list for discussion, but as
a notification of changes only mailing list.
Mailing List B: birt-dev or
birt-community
Community and development discussions: How to build, how to
debug? Suggestions / thoughts about the community - changes to the
website and/or wiki, project specification proposals/submissions, PMC minutes
(the entire community may be interested in these, not just committers), design
discussions.
I believe one of the goals of the BIRT project is to
attract, retain and grow the community. Also, the majority of
community members are not interested in the contents of what I am calling the
birt-commits mailing list.
If someone is just starting to learn
about BIRT, and wants to contribute, my thoughts are that they will be much more
prone to be active in the community if they can subscribe to the birt-community
mailing list versus the birt-commits mailing list.
Although all
subscribers to the existing mailing list coud create filters to remove the
notification items, I wouldn't expect community members would want to do this,
and I would assert that this would be an impediment to their engagement in
discussions.
I do understand that it is difficult to always get the
correct type of post for each mailing list, however, I think the above division
is fairly clear, and folks can always subscribe to both. Other than
the community being confused about which list to post to are there other reasons
for not having two mailing lists?
Regards,
Susan
----- Original
Message ----
From: Wenfeng Li <wli@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Susan Cline
<home4slc@xxxxxxxxxxx>; birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, January 30,
2007 4:14:12 PM
Subject: RE: [birt-dev] Thoughts about the mailing lists and
newsgroup
Hi, Susan
+1 for your idea of the contents that can
be posted to the birt-dev mailing list. And it is even better if the
community can tag/syndicate threads in the mailing list to the BIRT wiki site
for commonly interested topics, such as how to build from head version.
But I vote for having one mailing list for all those
contents, since different user might want different subset of the content. It is
difficult to have a division that meets everyone's need. Requiring
user to always use the right mailing list is also not easy. Even
with published the guideline, we still see user reporting bugs, asking usage
questions in the birt-dev mailing list. I expect same
will happen that the user community will not know which mailing list to use when
they want to send a message.
If you would like to avoid getting too many
emails about the check in notice and daily build status message to the birt-dev
mailing list, one approach is to set up a auto processing rule in your email
client to look for all emails with "check in:" or daily build status titles,
then move them to a folder or delete
them.
Regards,
Wenfeng
-----Original Message-----
From:
birt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:birt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Susan Cline
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 2:21 PM
To:
birt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [birt-dev] Thoughts about the mailing lists and
newsgroup
Hi,
The BIRT web site makes it pretty clear about
what the newsgroup and birt-dev mailing lists are for.
From the Community
page:
The BIRT newsgroup is for users of the project to ask questions,
discuss ideas and so on. Join in and get involved!
birt-dev (archive)
Development discussions about BIRT of interest to all BIRT committers. Topics
include PMC meeting minutes, source code structure, CVS management, and
integration among the various BIRT components.
It seems like discussion
of ideas tends to get lost in the newsgroup posts. BIRT users post
specific technical questions in the newsgroup, but very few discussions
occur.
Also, the birt-dev mailing list is intended to be limited to
information of interest to BIRT committers. This seems appropriate,
but it appears that most of the posts to this mailing list are check-ins,
updates or build status reports. These may be helpful to existing
BIRT committers, but for new contributors who are trying to learn BIRT, not a
lot of information is obtained from these posts, to actually help contributors
understand how to develop in BIRT.
I was wondering if an additional
mailing list could be created that would help new developers and community
members to discuss ideas and share their thoughts about infrastructure
suggestions. For instance, yesterday and today there has been some
exchange of ideas on the organization of the wiki, with the unlikely subject
line of: stored procedure in data set:
http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.birt/msg16235.htmlI
think it would be great to get more community input on how the wiki and website
are organized to increase involvement by the community, as well as increase the
quality of the information, but I fear that folks won't see this discussion when
it is buried in a post with that subject heading.
My thoughts are to have
two mailing lists with the following purposes:
Mailing list A: checkins,
build status, updates, API changes, BPS announcements, wiki additions/change
notices
Mailing list B: Community and development discussions: How to
build, how to debug? Suggestions / thoughts about the community -
changes to the website and/or wiki, project specification proposals/submissions,
PMC minutes (the entire community may be interested in these, not just
committers), design discussions.
Comments? Objections? Does
this make sense? Would folks be opposed to having two mailing
lists?
One of the reasons I was thinking this would be helpful is just as
discussions get lost in the newsgroup, discussions are lost in birt-dev with the
number of check-ins and update notices.
Also, per the newsgroup
discussion I cited above, I think it would be helpful if wiki additions/updates
could be subscribed to by either joining Mailing List A, or by possibly adding a
mechanism to the wiki itself that would allow community members to be notified
of wiki changes.
By doing so the community could become more responsive /
responsible for the content of the wiki, versus leaving committers to do the
bulk of the work.
Regards,
Susan
