Re: Mailing list policy
On Sat, 24 Jan 1998, Raul Miller wrote:
> joost witteveen <joost@rulcmc.leidenuniv.nl> wrote:
> > If this is turned into policy, I do hope that debian-devel is still
> > a very different list from debian-hamm: debian-hamm would be about
> > user-oriented questions in the hamm release, whereas debian-devel
> > would be for development related questions (about hamm, or maybe bo
> > security fixes or whatever).
>
> I'm not sure that the distinction "user" vs. "developer" is a good
> one. Remember that we provide a large number of development packages,
> and that our plans have an intimate effect on anyone with long-term
> systems administration issues. For example, is a question about plans
> for threads support a user question or a developer question?
Well, the interpretation I have on ths issue is this: if you have a
question about how to install, configure or use a program, it's a user
question. If you have a question about how to make a debian package of a
program, it's a developer question. A question like "does Debian have
plans to support..." would be a user question, I think, while a question
like "I want to implement ... and make a Debian package out of it, but how
do I do it?" would be a developer question.
I don't know if this is clear enough and I do think there are questions
that could fit in both of these lists. But I don't think that's a big
issue, since that won't be many questions.
I do think that questions about the unstable tree should be moved out of
debian-devel and into a new mailing list. The idea about a debian-user
list for 'stable' and a debian-unstable list for 'unstable' seems fine to
me. Another good idea I saw is to make a separate list for every tree, so
you would get debian-bo, debian-hamm, etc. and debian-user would be an
alias for "current stable and all previous releases" and debian-unstable
would be an alias for "current unstable". But if I had to choose, I would
prefer the first.
> Or, how about a question about how to change the log rotation policy
> so as to prevent the mail log files from overflowing a partition?
> Is that a user question or a developer question?
If it was a question about the general policy on this, it would have to go
to debian-policy. If it was a question about a specific item or about how
to implement it in a Debian package, it would be a developer question. If
it would be a question on how to implement it locally, it would be a user
question.
In all cases, Debian developers would be listening and be ready to give an
answer, so that won't be a problem.
> The answer in both of these cases seems to be that these *should* be
> user questions because they should have already been addressed on
> the development lists.:$
I think it is more complicated than that.
> That said, there *is* a problem with too much volume on debian-devel,
> but a lot of it is not a topic issue. Far too many times, I've seen
> people raise questions which have just been answered, forinstance.
> The only way to overcome this is for each person to accept some
> responsibility for resolving each issue (if only by listening).
Yes, that is a problem. But there seems to be coming a Debian-FAQ www
site, so questions that are asked many times could be answered with a very
short answer.
> I wouldn't mind reading so much, if I felt what I was reading was
> worth my time.
Agreed :-(
Remco
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