But Why? Re: [fab] Split Fedora-Announce-List

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Tue Apr 18 11:53:42 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-04-18 at 03:43 -0500, David Eisenstein wrote:
> Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> > On Mon, 17 Apr 2006, Elliot Lee wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>The way that worked well for RHL was separating things into a
> >>redhat-announce-list that received just regular announcements, and
> >>redhat-watch-list that received security notices.
> > 
> > 
> > +1 to fedora-watch-list for updates to all Fedora versions.
> 
> Have a question and a few comments.  Why do we need to do this?  Split up
> the Fedora-Announce list?  I haven't heard complaints from the general user
> community about there being announcements mixed in with package updates.
> The idea may have merits, might it be a good idea to run this by our peers
> in the Fedora community?

Ambassadors for example had complaints that general announcements being
mixed with package updates made it much harder for them to track
relevant information. 

> 
> Could there be downstream consequences to changing the lists and/or adding a
> new one?  Could there be end users or corporate users or security-related
> mailing lists or websites that will be affected if all of a sudden
> Fedora-Announce-List is bereft of software update announcements?

We would send a announcement to the list explaining the nature of the
change and why it is made of course.


> 
> Regarding Fedora Announcements (or Fedora *Package* Announcements):  I find
> that sometimes the announcements of package updates have ended up not being
> as well-maintained in the archives that are kept as I would like.  In my
> opinion, it is very important to have some formal repository where end-users
> and developers can go to find all the info on updates for package xyz for
> distro X.  But the Fedora Project does not (yet) offer some kind of formal
> web-based or RSS-based repository for package update information comparable
> to Red Hat Network's <http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/> web-pages for Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux.  We have instead - list archives.  Which work, to a point.
> 
> Sometimes these list archives end up borked.  For example, the gzipped
> mbox archive file for Fedora Announce List,
>   <http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2006-March.txt.gz>,
> is missing everything before March 22nd.  The other day, I needed that
> information:  So I had to go out to an externally-maintained place,
> gmane.org, to retrieve those missing announcements.  (Yes, I know, I should
> be subscribed there....)
> 
> The point is this:  However the Fedora lists are organized, they need to
> be well-maintained if they are to be a reliable record of Fedora software
> activity for end users who come to install Fedora long after a distro has
> been released, so they'll know what updates are available and why they've
> been updated from the CD's they bought.  This is the *only* record some of
> us have.
> 
> Thanks for considering these random thoughts.


Right. The lists would have to be well maintained but we are not going
to rely on this to notify end users about updates. Not many non
technical end users would subscribe to mailing list to keep themselves
updated. For them, the answer is providing good notification information
using client side tools that is already being worked upon.

Rahul




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