Esteemed Colleagues,
I believe as committers we are all obligated to subscribe to this
mailing list so that important announcements or information that
require, or would benefit from, the attention of all committers
can be disseminated with the expectation that everyone who should
receive them will receive them. Here's what it says at
https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/eclipse.org-committers
This list is the formal mailing list for committers on
Eclipse projects. This list will be used by the Eclipse
Foundation to communicate items of specific interest to the
committers such as project process, Board representative
elections, etc.
There are roughly a minimum of 1000 people receiving any note
send to this group. As such, this list is not intended as a
convenient mechanism for one person to solicit help from 1000
other people, and worse yet, as a mechanism for 1000 people to
observe such help being dispensed. I spend the better part of
every day helping people on the newsgroups. I poll for those
notes at my convenience and I do not generally appreciate pleas
for helped being pushed into my mailbox. Others have expressed
similar concerns already. I do not believe I have the option to
unsubscribe from this mailing list if the discussions generally
turn out to be uninteresting, unlike every other mailing list to
which I can subscribe based on interest. Sure I can send notes
off into a folder that I general ignore, or glance at once in a
while, but that devalues the purpose of this mailing list.
This entire thread started as a question about how to install
SVN, which to me is 100% off topic. It has turned into a
somewhat interesting discussion about the relative merits of CVS
and SVN, which isn't entirely off topic. But does it require the
attention of all 1000 comitters? A few have already expressed
the opinion that it does not, and still the notes continue.
Counting this one, we're well above 30; more traffic than we
typically see over several months. I understand that no one has
ill intent and I understand that some consider the suggestion to
move the discussion to a more narrowly focused mailing list to be
some type of free-speech violation, but surely we can all
understand that the need to respect each another.
Ken Clyne wrote:
I agree with Eugene and Karl.
I always find that attempts to throttle or regulate discussion
(though well intentioned) are always counter productive and
unfortunately discourage valuable dialog.
Let the dialog run free. By now I'm pretty good at filtering
email at my end.
Ken
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 6:11 PM, Karl Matthias
<karl.matthias@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:karl.matthias@xxxxxxxxxxx>>
wrote:
Masterson, Michael P wrote:
I agree that this list should remain open to all
committers. My general
view on distribution lists is that they should for the
most part be one
way communicaions. There are exceptions, for instance
if there are some
generic questions/answers that should be seen by the
entire committer
community. Or things like this where the community at
large could be
affected by its outcome.
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but all projects have
the ability to use either CVS or SVN at Eclipse as we
maintain both. Discussion about the advantages or
disadvantages of either *at Eclipse* are pretty important in
my opinion, and they do affect the entire community
substantively. With the exception of the very beginning of
the discussion, I personally find it hard to find fault with
any of the comments made, and particularly not at the point
where you felt it was appropriate to cut off discussion. At
that very point Walter was informing a committer who clearly
did not know (and is definitely not the only one, I can tell
you) about the IP cleanliness policy. I'm not sure what
could have been more germane, even given your definition above.
But when a discussion starts to de-evolve into a "I
think this", "Well I
think that" topic these emails start to lose credibility
and importance
to me. I think it would be nice if such a thing starts
to happen that
the originator or someone involved in the discussion
create a thread in
a message board and provide a link so that only
interested parties can
be involved further. In fact, an originator's
responsibility should be
to consider whether the topic might warrant wide spread
feedback and
provide an offline forum in their post.
When I'm on a list where a particular discussion, not the
whole list, but a particular thread loses interest to me, I
simply filter it. It takes practically no time or effort to
do it.
I really think that the majority of the emails I get
through this list
ARE important and warrant my attention. I am interested
in what other
projects are doing and in designer news/tips regarding
eclipse. I just
hope people treat such a large distro with the respect
it deserves.
Well there will certainly be cases where people post things
that aren't quite right for the target of the list. But as
we grow as a community and the appropriateness of certain
discussions is made clear I expect that concern will
diminish. And we can always gently remind people of how
we've decided to use this list, once we've done that.
Karl
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_______________________________________________
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<mailto:eclipse.org-committers@xxxxxxxxxxx>
https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/eclipse.org-committers
IMPORTANT: Membership in this list is generated by processes
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