Julian Foad wrote on Mon, 21 Aug 2017 12:48 +0100:
> I have heard it said that it works best to designate a mailing
> list/channel/group for a given *topic* rather than for a given set of
> *people*. Perhaps you could re-frame your idea in those terms?
Certainly. In this specific case, the idea was for us (upstream) to
communicate to distro packagers and client maintainers in their role as
proxies of users: since 99% of users don't read announce@, if we want a
message from us to reach users it will help if, say, the various client GUIs
will advertise 1.10.0-beta1 on their blogs and so on.
Then there's the question of where to direct that feedback to. Traditionally
it'd be dev@ or users@, but perhaps some users would be more inclined to
send feedback if there were a means of doing so without posting to a mailing
list (for example, a web form on svn-qavm.a.o). I.e., lower the barrier to
participation for feedback senders.
Part of the feedback we're seeking is feedback about new APIs. Right now,
there is no easy solution for an API consumer who wants to keep track of
changes: either follow dev@ or commits@ and accept the low [for that
use-case] SNR, or follow announce@ and get a message once a year or so,
about all changes over the last 18 months… which is generally long after the
design discussions have finished [and, sometimes, after the developer's
funding has run out].
The common thread in all this is how to reach our users and API consumers so
as to set up a feedback loop.
Creating mailing lists is trivial. The hard problem is knowing what mailing
lists to create and getting the target audience to subscribe to them; and
it's hard to do _that_ without having a preëxisting way to talk to the
target audience…
Cheers,
Daniel
Received on 2017-08-21 20:08:05 CEST