Re: communication

On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 08:45:50PM +0300, Vadim Plessky wrote:
>On Sunday 23 March 2003 18:33, Michel Dänzer wrote:
>|  On Son, 2003-03-23 at 13:16, Vadim Plessky wrote:
>|  > On Sunday 23 March 2003 11:02, Craig Groeschel wrote:
>|  > |  >  - Lack of participation on [email protected].
>|  > |
>|  > |  RIP.
>|  > |
>|  > |  Why _was_ the render list folded back into the xfree86 list?
>|  > |  One day I'm reading about trapezoid rasterization and the next
>|  > |  day my mailbox is full of other people's XF86Config files.  I
>|  > |  was surprised.  Generally discussions become more focused, not
>|  > |  less so.  (Imagine folding comp.os.linux.* back into the
>|  > |  original comp.os.linux.)
>|  >
>|  > Reasons to close RENDER list are unclear to me.
>|  > There were 200 participants for that list, or so.
>|  > <[email protected]> is very high-traffic list, and I am not interested
>|  > in most of the mails posted to that list.
>|  > So, I unsibscibed from <[email protected]> list after some testing
>|  > period. I just couldn't stand a lot of mails which are off-topic for me.
>|
>|  Why do you compare [email protected] to [email protected] and not
>|  [email protected] ?
>
>That's simple.
><[email protected]> was merged with Xpert list to  <[email protected]>
>People who were subscribed to Render list, found difficult to follow XFree86 
>ML and unsubscribed.
>
>Questions discussed on <[email protected]> are too generic, too.
>Plus just a few people subscribed, as list hasn't been widely advertised.

A few statistics regarding subscribers:

  render was somewhere in the 100-200 range IIRC

  xfree86:     ~700
  devel:       ~550
  cvs-commit:  ~300
  forum:       ~250
  fonts:       ~400
  i18n:        ~450

550 subscribers isn't bad for a list that wasn't "widely advertised".

>I followed Render list as it was related to font technologies and rendering of 
>vector graphics.
>But, hopefully, there is a XSVG <[email protected]> mailing list now, so it's not 
>a problem (for me) anymore.
>But this is certanly a good indication how unfriendly to users & developers 
>can be some decisions of XFRee86 Core team. :-(

One of the problems with the render list was that discussions
totally unrelated to render were happening there rather than in an
a more appropriate place.  One of the reasons was that those like
yourself who like a lower mail volume would choose it as their
venue.  Is that in the best interests of the development community
as a whole?  I don't think it was good for some of the communication
problems that have emerged.

XFree86 had ended up with a rather fragmented development and user
community with it's odd and numerous collection of private and
public lists.  The consolidation that saw these folded into a single
public developer list, and a single public user/bug/support list
was an attempt at providing easily identifiable venues for the
XFree86 developer and user communities.

David
-- 
David Dawes
Release Engineer/President                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes