[sugar] Proposal: Activity developers mailing list

[Morgan Collett]

Thanks Martin and Albert for your dissenting opinions. They are valuable.

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 13:36, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:47 PM, Morgan Collett
> <morgan.collett at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am happy to take on making this communication happen but I really
>> think we need this list.
>
> FWIW, Sugar + activities are still somewhat tightly coupled, as Sugar
> and the underlying OS API are changing. As long as that is true, to
> maintain an activity to a good standard, you have to keep an eye on
> devel@ and/or sugar-devel at .
>
> My rule of thumb is to try and keep people together -- recommending
> filters sometimes -- until the traffic gets so heavy *and* a distinct
> subcommunity can be split off. IMHO neither is true here (yet!).

In my experience the activity developer community has lost many
participants already. Perhaps they weren't going to stay anyway,
beyond an initial

> The flip side is that offering a new ml to a small/medium sized group
> is a great way to *kill* that group. It is an excellent troll mgmt
> strategy.

The last thing I want to do is fragment the community.

Let me add some personal context: I started out writing a couple of
activities for MaMaMedia. At that time it was very confusing trying to
figure out the state of the platform. Going by the HIG, there was this
excellent feature called the Bulletin Board which seemed exactly what
I needed. Also, the collaboration features were exactly what I wanted.
I had to ask on IRC to find out the bulletin board was non-existant
and the collaboration was only partially implemented and only in a
single existing activity.

I personally found the best approach was to follow all communication
channels to try and figure out what worked and what didn't, and what
the best way to use the existing features was. I subscribed to all the
technical mailing lists. I stayed logged on to IRC and read the
backlogs every morning. It worked for me.

However, most other activity authors that I was aware of, have
vanished. They haven't updated their activities in months (if at all
this year). I'm quite certain that mailing devel@ or sugar@ will not
get their attention. Those are both high traffic lists, with a lot of
traffic not relevant to activities, as Martin Dengler has analysed:

2008/8/3 Martin Dengler <martin at martindengler.com>:
> I'm not sure I agree - sugar@ has so much traffic not
> relevant to "casual" activity authors (for example, your
> "Congratulations..." thread).
>
> I can't believe I did this, but I went through the July sugar@
> messages and categorized them into ones I thought would be appropriate
> for the AA list and ones not (thus for the current sugar@ list).
>
> Totals:  808 messages
> AA - 293 messages 36.3%
> SS - 515 messages 63.7%
>
> You may see the details here:
> http://dev.laptop.org/~mdengler/sugar_list_july_2008_categorized.txt

My hope is to have a mailing list that is the *last* one that an
overwhelmed developer will unsubscribe from, so we can still reach
them.

Regards
Morgan