proposal: separate lists for ghc-cvs commits and ghc-dev chatter

[Sean Leather]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 1:29 PM, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

> My own understanding is this:
>
> A GHC *user* is someone who uses GHC, but doesn't care how it is
> implemented.
> A GHC *developer* is someone who wants to work on GHC itself in some way.
>
> The current mailing lists:
>
> * glasgow-haskell-users: for anything that a GHC *user* cares about
> * glasgow-haskell-bugs: same, but with a focus on bug reporting
> * cvs-ghc: for GHC *developers*
>
> I don't think we want to confuse users with developers.  If we flood users
> with dev-related conversations they'll get fed up.
>
> I don't see a very useful distinction between glasgow-haskell-users and
> glasgow-haskell-bugs.  The distinction was very important before we had a
> bug tracker, but it doesn't seem useful now.
>
> I can see a perhaps-useful distinction between two *developer* lists
>  (A) human email about implementation aspects of GHC
>  (B) machine-generated email from buildbots etc
>
> I rather think that (A) could usefully include Trac ticket creation and
> Git commit messages, since both are really human-generated.


I think the last two things (tickets and commit messages) should be
separate from a mailing that is intended for (email-only) discussion. The
content may be human-generated, but:

(1) The number of messages is overwhelming. Alternatively stated, if you
consider each ticket or commit message a different thread (which many email
clients do), the number of different threads is large.
(2) The commit messages do not all lead to conversations, and most of the
discussion on tickets takes place on Trac with every message duplicated to
the list.

Consequently, any email-only discussion threads on the mailing list can
easily get lost among all the other threads.


> So that would leave only buildbot logs on (B).
>
>
> So I would be content to
>   * Abolish glasgow-haskell-bugs in favour of glasgow-haskell-users
>   * Split out cvs-ghc into two in some way; details to be agreed.
>
> But for me the issue is not a pressing one.
>

I identify the following different needs:

(1) User email discussion
(2) Developer email discussion
(3) Buildbot reports
(4) Trac reports
(5) Commit messages

Users will be interested in (1). Developers or followers of GHC development
are probably interested in (1) and (2) but not necessarily (3 - 5).
Maintainers or "serious" developers are probably interested in some
combination of the above, including (1) and (2). People who track bugs (in
general or for fun) would be interested in (4). Since Trac tickets have a
CC option, many people probably don't need to subscribe to this list.
Developers who police development would be interested in (3 - 5).

By having a separate mailing list for each of (1) and (2), the email-only
discussion does not get overwhelmed by the traffic of (3 - 5). And a
separate mailing for each of (3 - 5) would allow the interested parties to
subscribe to only what they want. Also, if you want to respond to an email
on (3 - 5), then you are probably already subscribed to (2), so you can CC
(2) in your response, thus bringing more developers into the conversation.

(Personally, I've been using filters in Gmail to mark-read stuff that I'm
not interested in, but I would be even happier to have the mailing lists
further segmented.)

Regards,
Sean
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