[sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list

[Brian Jordan]

On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 12:53 PM, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Morgan Collett writes:
>
>> We didn't get to discuss this activity developers' mailing list
>> at the Sugar meetings. However I've had no negative feedback.
>> If anyone is opposed to this list, please speak up quickly and
>> loudly. Otherwise I will get it created in the next week,
>> publicize it and invite all known activity developers whose email
>> addresses I can track down to subscribe.
>
> Well I don't want to be all that negative because it isn't my
> server and I'm not joining the list, so I have little reason to
> care. If you're looking for reasons why the list isn't useful
> though, sure:
>
> This will eventually, if not immediately, be a dead list.
>
> Few people want to work on all activities. Activities often
> do not share much in common. For developer D1 who likes to
> hack on activity A1, emails about activity A2 are noise.

Not sure about that... I propose that many activity developers would
love to help casually with other activities, and that the lack of
large-group collaboration on development of many activities could be
cured by having a tangible activity developers' group.

I've done some thinking about this (w.r.t. activities + git
repositories) at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_co-op

>
> Generally, the expertise will be elsewhere. If I need to discuss
> programming the camera, where does it make sense for me to go?
> Certainly an activity mailing list is not the place.
>

I could see discussing camera activity development (pygame/camera) on
an activity devel list.

Brian

> If the list were moderated, to be used ONLY for announcements
> of things that break the API/ABI, then there could be some value.
> In that case, you'd need to split up Python and non-Python.
> Like this:
>
> python-breakage at lists.sugarlabs.org
> lowlevel-breakage at lists.sugarlabs.org
>
> There could also be a list to announce new activities.
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>