fedora-devel-announce for ABI/API/soname breakage announcements

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 06.03.2009 08:00, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-03-06 at 07:03 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> Why not simply mail f-d-l as well as all the maintainers of packages 
>> that are affected (and not fedora-devel-announce!)? A simple command 
                           ^^^
>> line script is able to do that in case MTA's like sendmail or postfix 
>> are properly configured. That script likely could write a comma 
>> separated list that people can cut-n-paste to Thunderbird, Kmail and 
>> other MUA's if needed.
> Fedora-devel-list is subscribed to fedora-devel-announce, so anything
> sent to f-d-a will also show up on f-d-l.

You misread; see the "not" above ;-)

>> Reason: I for one slowly start to get annoyed by the slowly increasing 
>> traffic on fedora-devel-announce that clutters my inbox. Thus I started 
>> to consider to move mails from that list into some IMAP folder 
>> automatically, and that is exactly what we didn't want people to do when 
>> fedora-devel-announce was created. I think we said something like "less 
>> then 10 mails a month" back when we created it, but I could not find 
>> that on a quick google search :-/
> Are you finding what is sent there to not be relevant or important to
> you as a packager? I'm the moderator of that list and I don't think
> I've sent or let anything through that wasn't useful.

As Kevin replied: "If the proposal is to send any and all soname bumps 
there, this will make it much higher volume." That's what I fear, as the 
volume IMHO already is to high. Seems it wasn't obvious enough in my 
initial mail :-/ sorry.

To say it in different words: f-d-a afaik was created to make sure that 
all contributors get aware of all the *important* issues. That afaics 
will only work properly as long as the information that comes over the 
list most of the time is relevant for the one that receives it, 
otherwise people will consider the mails from the list as spam and 
filter them away -- which is exactly what we didn't want people to do 
when f-d-a was created.

That includes people that maintain just one single package in Fedora -- 
like for example grenier does, who takes care of testdisk upstream and 
in Fedora. Ask yourself: How many of the mails that went to f-d-a in 
February were relevant for developers like him -- developers that only 
want to maintain their own software in Fedora and nothing else (I guess 
some of those might not even use Fedora regularly....)

 From a quick look on
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-February/thread.html
I'd say: maybe half of the mails, likely way less.

The "Test Day" announcement for example. Or the soname bumps. FUDCon 
Berlin 2009. Announcing Fedora 11 Alpha (blink). None of them afaics is 
allowed according to the rules that are written on
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-announce

Quoting:
---
 > This list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for
 > Fedora development.
 >
> Acceptable Types of Announcements
> - Policy or process changes that affect developers.
> - Infrastructure changes that affect developers.
> - Tools changes that affect developers.
> - Schedule changes
> - Freeze reminders
> 
> Unacceptable Types of Announcements
> - Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule)
> - Discussion
> - Anything else not mentioned above
---

But it's likely a matter of interpretation.

Anyway: enough said. I think I made my point clear now and it's up to 
others to decide.

CU
knurd