Mailing list etiquette

[Jim Gettys]

On Fri, 2006-10-27 at 21:11 +0700, supat at supat.eu.org wrote: 
> Hi Jim,
> 
> Sorry for posting to the wrong group. I did not know that it has separated 
> group and did not be a member of other groups. I did not use jhbuild 
> instructions too but used build.sh and manually compiling.
> 
> I think it should have one stop service to do all things about OLPC to 
> prevent mistake that I did.
> 
> 

Usually, mailing lists try to make it clear whether they are for generic
questions, or, almost always, on specific topics.  There are few "one
stop shopping" mailing lists or IRC channels anywhere, though they do
exist.

In general, Supat, discussions and questions should go to the mailing
lists and/or IRC channels for the software where that software is
developed.  We develop most of our software in those projects directly,
and we can be found in those projects' mailing lists too.  All of us
working on OLPC X Window System software are, of course subscribed to
those mailing lists as well as the OLPC lists.

The reason is simple: most people on the OLPC mailing lists will not be
building infrastructure like the X Window System themselves,  (they are
using the pre-built distribution) and therefore won't be able to answer
the questions you ask. 

People working on building and packaging X will be found on X Window
System mailing lists and IRC channels, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
If you will, they are often your peers from Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, etc,
who are packaging X for a particular Linux distribution, and the people
developing the technology themselves (sometimes people play both roles).

On most mailing lists, people will be discussing the software being
specifically developed by that project.  Even here at OLPC, the volume
of mail is already too high, so we've separated devel into two lists:
devel, and sugar (for the sugar UI work).  This is true in general for
mailing lists, not just OLPC. 

In this case, your question is appropriate, but only somewhat: we are
doing some X development as part of OLPC.   But X development is in very
specific areas only: the AMD Geode display driver and the touchpad.
Questions or problems specific to either of those are more than welcome
here. There is nothing OLPC specific about building X in general, and it
would have been more appropriate to ask on an X.org list.  You are
*much* more likely to get a quick response on one of the X lists than
devel at laptop.org. 

On the devel at laptop.org mailing list there are about 3-5 people who
might be able to help you with generic X building problems, and of order
hundreds of people who won't be able to help at all and to which the
question in your mail message is "noise". 

On the X.org mailing lists and IRC channels, half or more of the people
subscribing are in a position that they could have told you that Xcb has
some build problems right now, due to its repository layout. Before
sending mail to a mailing list think: "is this where most people working
in that area who could help with the problem"?, and "is it on topic for
this specific list" and "have I tried to find the solution myself"?  If
you answer these questions first, you'll be helping everyone, including
yourself, and get a warmer reception, and get answers much faster. Eric
Raymond's essay we noted earlier to you goes into this in more detail.

We discuss the OLPC specific X work on the OLPC devel mailing lists
because this way we aren't bothering people on the xorg lists with
questions and issues that they can't yet help with: our machine is not
yet shipping in quantity, so there aren't many people on the X mailing
lists able to help in those specific areas.  This will change, but right
now, this helps both X.org and us.  It helps us, by letting people
working on OLPC know there may be problems specific to OLPC they might
run into, and it helps X.org, by not increasing their mail load when
most of those people have no way they could help.  If they were
interested enough to help, they've likely already subscribed to our
list, and asked for a developer board.

Best of all, of course, is to search the bug reporting system and/or
mailing lists for the project in question (X) first. Google is your
friend. You'll often find the answer to your questions without having to
wait for us to be awake on the opposite side of the world, or be able to
find help in nearby timezones on the right mailing list or IRC channel.

The X.org development IRC channel is freenode #xorg-devel (dash rather
than underscore).

I hope this explanation of the use of mailing lists helps you.
                                   Regards,
                                         - Jim


-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child