[Server-devel] suggest new mailing lists for OLPC

[Bill Bogstad]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 1:03 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 11:16 AM, Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:
>> Can I suggest  instead a new mailing list for server SUPPORT be
>> created as opposed to DEVELOPMENT?  And what about doing XO support on
>> commmunity-support rather then devel? I think that both server-devel
>> and devel are used too often for things that they shouldn't be.
>
> Don't let the names confuse you. You want to have the developers in
> the same place as users, otherwise you're going to
>
>  - get bad answers in the 'support' list, as the real experts are elsewhere
>  - get developers out of touch with real issues

I guess I need to make myself more clear.  I'm not telling developers
not to be involved in support mailing lists.
Nor am I suggesting that users shouldn't be allowed to "drink from the
development firehose" if they desire.
I'm saying that OLPC software (XS and XO) is now deployed and users of
released version X really don't
need to be spammed with much of the stuff that goes across the
development lists.  This is probably
more true of the XO software, but XS is moving in that direction.

>
> It's all about fostering a good, positive community around the school
> server. It's _not_ about labels. If you want, I'm happy to support
> renaming 'server-devel' to 'server'.

No, it's about forcing people to wade through email that won't help
them and will always be irrelevant to them just so they can get their
questions answered.

> Even for large communities, it's more positive and productive to split
> things along interest lines than across "users" and "developers".

So why is it that so many free software projects end up with separate
user and developer mailing lists?  It seems to me that the more
successful they are, the more likely they are to have lists that break
along similar lines.

My suggestion would (effectively) takes things from 2 to 4 lists.  I
strongly assert that someone who is tasked with maintaining an XS 0.4
and XO 767 installation (for example) will have little or no interest
in the latest broken release build.  At least not until the next break
between school years, when it becomes conceivable to do an upgrade.