Re: [eclipse-dev] Why eclipse-dev gets so many user posts -- and why the

["Mike Wills" <programmer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Could I also recommend an email list? Yes, I am a user, not a developer. I
was looking for an email list to join and couldn't find one, so I joined
this one. Otherwise can you recommend me to a good site to do posts?
-- 
Mike Wills
iSeries Programmer
programmer AT koldarkDOTnet


Timothy Halloran said:
> BACKGROUND: My research at CMU is involved in improving quality of open
> source projects, as such we have investigated several of them with an
> aim of understanding the community (some ideas can be seen in a paper
> at http://opensource.ucc.ie/icse2002/) -- hence I wanted to raise, some
> hopefully helpful, suggestions from my discussions with developers of
> other projects (Apache, Jakarta, KDE, Mozilla) as to why I would expect
> user posts to eclipse-dev to increase.
>
> The setup of your site is different than other successful "portal"-
> oriented open source sites.  You require passwords to even look at the
> user newsgroup archives -- this is bad in two respects: (1) the user to
> user help should be a mailing list (spam control, the stated reason for
> these access controls, can be maintained by Mailman or some other
> modern mailer) newsgroups are very unusual (almost all open source
> projects maintain a user mailing list), and far more importantly (2)
> the archive should be open to the public without password access.  The
> savvy user can search these archives quickly (via your site or Google)
> and get answers.
>
> As the open-source version of Eclipse gets popular (sure to increase
> with the excellent work in version 2.0) -- more user posts will arrive
> on this list due to the lack of a public user to user mailing list.
>
> In general, I recommend archives be public -- even developer lists --
> this helps new folks (like our friend who is trying to build the source
> code) from asking questions that have been answered or having to join
> the mailing list just to search it.  An exception, which might be of
> some interest, is that Apache has a "private" mailing list for
> reporting serious security problems directly to key developers (rather
> than public postings which could be exploited). I don't know if this
> any issues of this sort apply to Eclipse (maybe on the web-server side
> development?).
>
> A good example site is your direct open source competition, NetBeans!
>
> Lastly, I am experienced setting up open source web sites (here at CMU
> we have done several Apache/Mailman/Bugzilla on Linux sites for
> research projects) and am more than willing to help out (feel free to
> contact me directly at hallorant(at)acm.org)!
>
> Finally, I know this post is a bit off the mark, but I didn't have a
> password to the "Web-Site/Admin" mailing list :>
>
> Take Care,
> Tim Halloran
> Carnegie Mellon University
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