I just realzied that the non-discussion emails (bugs, wiki, and commits) are going in to the forums. The account that is subscribed is forum-struts-dev (AT) opensymphony (DOT) com. Is there any way we can disable those other emails to that account?
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I'm not sure if I'd call those posts "non-discussion". We often have
discussions by commenting on bug tickets. Since we are "commit then
review", a commit log or wiki post is often the genesis of a
discussion about the change.

A commit or wiki event are not historical footnotes. These posts are a
request for a peer review of the change, and an implicit vote as to
whether the change should even take place. if someone is not following
these posts, then much of the activity on the project will be missed.
If a forum is going to be a replacement for the mailing lists, then
the forum must cover all the mailing lists, else forum followers will
be given a false sense of currency.

There is a separate commits@ list, and so it would be easy to setup a
separate forum for those. (But, again, we send out the commit logs so
that they can be reviewed, so there should be a forum for those too!)
The wiki and issue-trackers are both subscribed directly to dev@, so
getting those into separate forums would be problematic, unless Jive
does filtering on its own.

I can't over-emphasize the vital importance of mailing lists to an ASF
project. We consider the mailing list to be our communal memory. If
something doesn't happen on the list, then it didn't happen.

For today, we want everything that you can know about a project to go
over the lists, so that the PMC and others can monitor everything that
happens on a project. For tomorrow, we want everything to go over the
lists, so that our successors can search the archives and see what we
already decided and why.

Every decision we make is in exactly one place: the mailing list archives.

I'm a big fan of Jive forums, and I think having forums for the
project lists is a Good Thing. But, the forums should cover all the
traffic, because all the traffic is there for a reason.
-Ted.

1/16/06, Patrick Lightbody <forum-struts-dev (AT) opensymphony (DOT) comwrote:
I just realzied that the non-discussion emails (bugs, wiki, and commits) are going in to the forums. The account that is subscribed is forum-struts-dev (AT) opensymphony (DOT) com. Is there any way we can disable those other emails to that account?

Posted via Jive Forums
#28683

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I agree with Ted about the importance of mailing lists. Mailing lists
are the "Apache Way." The only time I have used off-llist
communication is during an infrastructure move where we needed to
rapidly complete several steps in a short period of time. Even then
the basic outline of work was agreed to in advance on the mailing
list.

Mailing lists may seem outdated but they are the lifeblood of the ASF
and they continue to serve us well. There may be more rapid ways of
communicating (phone calls and internet chat come to mind) but these
are exclusionary. The community is world wide and people have day
jobs. It takes a little longer to hash things out over email but
everyone gets to participate this way.

The result is a single archive that is publicly searchable and
contains all relevant decisions (no matter how trivial) in one place.

My .02

Sean

1/17/06, Patrick Lightbody <forum-struts-dev (AT) opensymphony (DOT) comwrote:
Ted,
I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but you seem to imply that I don't have any experience with this sort of stuff. I do.

We too at Symphony use mailing lists quite heavily (as does every other decent open source project out there). However, as technologies like RSS have grown more popular, we adapted. Now we get our wiki changes and CVS changes through RSS (Confluence and FishEye both provide RSS feeds). We also offer the option of email messages, but that is up to the individual.

Conversations still continue around wiki changes and commits. For those that subscribe to the mailing lists, they simply forward the message to the dev list. For those that don't, they simply post a new message asking, "John, can you explain why you changed Foo.java yesterday?".

Try to understand where I'm coming from: the wiki and commit changes aren't interesting to me (I don't have time to look through any of them). Not just for Struts, but for WebWork too. Instead, I do weekly reviews. With Struts, I just delete those messages as they come in. And when I look at the forums:

I see "N NT REPLY" and "[Struts Wiki]", making it just as difficult for me to keep up with the other conversations. I didn't mean to imply that those messages sometime don't spur a conversation, but pragmatically 99% of the chatter I've seen does not come from them.

I definitely understand where you are coming from, and I hope you can see where I'm coming from. when people have different work behaviors, the best bet is to provide more options. This can be done by somehow allowing individuals to opt out of those generated emails. I hope we can do something about this.

Patrick

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1/17/06, Patrick Lightbody <forum-struts-dev (AT) opensymphony (DOT) comwrote:
I definitely understand where you are coming from, and I hope you can see where I'm
coming from. when people have different work behaviors, the best bet is to provide
more options. This can be done by somehow allowing individuals to opt out of those
generated emails. I hope we can do something about this.

I think an important point is that these emails are being generated by
people. People are making the wiki changes, and people are creating
the issue tickets, and people are making the subversion commits. Each
and every one of those emails contains original input from a real
person that deserves the attention of the dev list.

The issue trackers posts are marked "D NT REPLY", because we want to
keep the discussion under the comments for each issue. So, to reply,
you follow the link to the ticket. But, by posting the status changes
to the ticket, we are all being kept abreast of what is happening on a
ticket, whether we click thru or not. We don't have to schedule time
to review the issue tracker, the issue tracker comes to us in real
time.

Case in point: Right now, Roller is being incubated, and we don't have
JIRA posting to the dev list yet. I created and posted a ticket over
the weekend. But, no one noticed until I made a second post to dev@
mentioning the ticket. Volunteers should not have to make a redundant
post to the mailing list when JIRA can do it automatically.

For a number of reasons, including legal ones, we do want all the
input and discussions, whether they take place on the wiki or the
issue tracker or anywhere else, to end up on a mailbox on an ASF
server.

Now, we could create a wiki@ mailing list and an issue@ mailing list,
to match the commit@ list, but now when people opt-in, they have to
opt into five lists instead of three. If we add a Roller blog to the
mix, then there would be six.

Right now, the ASF norm is three lists: That's what we create when
projects come through the Incubator.If we want more than that (and I'm
not sure that we do), I'd be happy to bring it up on the internal ASF
members list, to get input from other ASF communities. Perhaps someone
else here has already discussed having more lists at length, or even
tried more lists.

IMH, it sounds like Jive is not up to the task of managing an
ASF-style dev list. Any decent mailreader can filter mails into
whatever folders we find convenient, creating the personal equivalent
of five or six separate lists, if that's what someone wants.
-Ted.

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IMH, it sounds like Jive is not up to the task of managing an
ASF-style dev list. Any decent mailreader can filter mails into
whatever folders we find convenient, creating the personal equivalent
of five or six separate lists, if that's what someone wants.

GMail also has *excellent* search capabilties. I find it to be
superior to searching the public archives so I just never delete my
mailing list emails!

BTW, there was talk of switching to JIRA a while back. I'm still +1
for that. Its a much nicer system and I find it less cumbersome then
bugzilla. My point here is that its more tempting to "reply" to the
bug in the proper place.
-Ted.

Sean

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course http://struts.roomity.com is both (as is news.gmane.org)

(It's a nail, I am the hammer)

V

To that end, mailing lists work, and forums do not.

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1/17/06, Don Brown <mrdon (AT) twdata (DOT) orgwrote:
I'd like to see a compromise where I could sign up for mailing list that only contains
discussions, yet track tickets,
wiki updates, and commits via RSS. This discussion-only mailing list could be a second
mailing list that just
automatically filters out undesired messages.

I guess what I don't understand is why relay one via RSS and not the other.

The mailing list discussions may be free-form, but that does not make
them more or less valuable than the discussions we have through the
issue ticket, wiki, and repository logs.

Wendy updates the release plan, and through the wiki log automatically
discusses her changes with me and with the rest of us. Craig commits
and automatically discusses what he just did and what he's going to do
next. Looking over the issue tickets, every third or fourth turns into
a discussion. Sometimes the discussion is: "Got a problem or a patch",
followed by "Fixed", but that's a discussion nonetheless.

What bothers me most is the implication that just because these logs
are being forwarded from the issue tracker, or repository, or wiki,
they are somehow less valuable than a free-form message. In practice,
I'd say the opposite is more likely to be true. The *real* development
decisions are being made on the tickets and in the commits. It's only
the odds and ends that we discuss here.
-Ted.

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I don't think anyone, and certainly not I, is arguing that wiki and ticket messages are somehow less important, only
that they are different, and perhaps viewed at different times or in different ways.

Just as those that prefer mail clients heavily use folders to sort their mail, I've found RSS readers to be a great way
to track different types of discussions or sites. I've found it productive personally to only use email for things I
need to respond to, i.e. interpersonal discussions. I keep my inbox completely empty and rarely use folders.

the other hand, for my day job, I use the RSS feed from Trac to follow a project's "Timeline", or history of commits,
ticket updates, and wiki changes. Since 95% of the time I don't need to respond, the RSS approach works well.

My point is we need to keep an open mind, and allow people to use whatever tools or approaches they find most valuable.
This WebWork merger is bigger than a merging of code, but also one of people, development styles, project directions,
etc. We need to make an extra effort not to try force everyone to do it "our way" or reject new ideas or styles
outright. I'm not saying anyone is doing that currently, but we must be extra vigilant to protect against it.

If Struts is going to be accepting of what some would call two opposite web framework approaches, we should also be
tolerant, even encouraging, of different personal ideas, approaches, and perspectives.

</sermon;)

Don

Ted Husted wrote:
1/17/06, Don Brown <mrdon (AT) twdata (DOT) orgwrote:

>>I'd like to see a compromise where I could sign up for mailing list that only contains
>>discussions, yet track tickets,
>>wiki updates, and commits via RSS. This discussion-only mailing list could be a second
>>mailing list that just
>>automatically filters out undesired messages.

I guess what I don't understand is why relay one via RSS and not the other.

The mailing list discussions may be free-form, but that does not make
them more or less valuable than the discussions we have through the
issue ticket, wiki, and repository logs.

Wendy updates the release plan, and through the wiki log automatically
discusses her changes with me and with the rest of us. Craig commits
and automatically discusses what he just did and what he's going to do
next. Looking over the issue tickets, every third or fourth turns into
a discussion. Sometimes the discussion is: "Got a problem or a patch",
followed by "Fixed", but that's a discussion nonetheless.

What bothers me most is the implication that just because these logs
are being forwarded from the issue tracker, or repository, or wiki,
they are somehow less valuable than a free-form message. In practice,
I'd say the opposite is more likely to be true. The *real* development
decisions are being made on the tickets and in the commits. It's only
the odds and ends that we discuss here.
-Ted.

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1/17/06, Patrick Lightbody <forum-struts-dev (AT) opensymphony (DOT) comwrote:
Thoughts? I understand that this does involve some work, and for those of you who are
quite happy with how things are now, it may seem like a waste of time. As such, I'm
more than willing to do the actual work for any proposed solution.

The ASF infrastructure is about to enter into a transitional period.
After more than a year of hemming and hawing, we finally made some
decisions as to how to proceed. Two new infrastructure teams will be
coming on board. will handle the mail, and the other will handle
everything else.

This is just not a good time to try and do things that deviate from
the ASF norm. My suggestion would be to table the discussion for six
months and revisit it when the new infrastructure teams are up and
running, and ready to prove themselves.

course, if there are things that can be done without involving the
ASF infrastructure, by all means, go ahead and do it. :)

My suggestion would be to setup Jive forums for each of the lists that
we would like to see (user, dev, commit, issues, and wiki), and use
filters to separate content as needed. Then, people will be able to
see exactly what the effect would be. After six months, we'd have
enough experience and traffic to demonstrate how well it works, and we
could pitch it to the new infrastructure team.
-Ted.

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