[tahoe-dev] administrative note: no more trac email on tahoe-dev

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:
>
>  I'm going to stop sending a few hand-selected messages from the trac
>  instance to tahoe-dev
...
> Why?  I suppose it might too noisy to subject every to, but I find that
> I'm more likely to post a ticket comment knowing that it will be part of
> the tahoe-dev conversation.

First that it takes some of my time to manually choose which messages
to forward, but more importantly that it gives people a false
impression of the trac-based conversations.

Some people don't realize that there are trac tickets that never
appear on tahoe-dev, and they may be relying on tahoe-dev to notify
them of trac tickets and thus miss out on something that is important
to them.

Even more insidious, forwarding selected messages shows people a
censored view of particular conversations. For example, if you compare
the trac emails about "make FUSE be a first-class feature" as it
appeared on tahoe-dev vs. as it appeared on tahoe-lafs-trac-stream,
you'll see that I forwarded all posts so far *except* for one
particular message from David-Sarah! If you are relying on reading
tahoe-dev to keep up with that conversation then you missed an
important part of it without realizing that you did so.

I'm not sure what the best solution is. Maybe people who have things
to say to *both* a ticket discussion and to tahoe-dev should manually
cut-and-paste their comment into both forums. People frequently have
things to say to both forums and I think this is a very healthy
pattern. Or, people could post to tahoe-dev and then update the trac
ticket with a link to their message in the tahoe-dev archives.

Or, specific trac tickets could have Cc: tahoe-dev added to them, and
readers could understand that only specific tickets are being posted
to the list, but for those tickets every comment is being posted?

I'm really not sure what is best. If I had to choose right now I would
say that people are encouraged to "cross post" their trac comments by
setting Cc: tahoe-dev when they post their trac comment and then
immediately unsetting it afterward. Then at least the decision about
whether a given comment goes to the list would be in the hands of the
comment-writer instead of a moderator and would be made on a
per-comment basis.

Regards,

Zooko