separate discussion and development lists

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 20:15:40 (CEST), Andreas Tille wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 10:10:45AM +0200, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
>> Perhaps? My biggest concern is that with 3 lists, it becomes more and
>> more challenging to decide to which list to post. Replies to -vcs mails
>> currently go to -maintainers because of the reply-to, so I guess that
>> would remain. But what about discussion mails on -maintainers, that are
>> supposed to go to debian-multimedia at l.d.o? This overhead of
>> meta-discussion about a topic being ontopic or offtopic is the price I
>> see for having a third list. (it could be mitigated with a proper and
>> clear charter, I imagine).
>
> For me the maintainers list is way to noisy and I guess a lot of users
> will see it the same way.  Moreover I'm afraid that just because of the
> name of the list as well as the location users will not even consider
> subscribing this list (as I would never have done if I would not
> explicitely asked to raise the Blends topic here).  IMHO we have no
> proper place to discuss the issues of multimedia users inside Debian and
> that's a pity because we might loose users (and potential developers)
> because of this.

I've had a small private followup conversation with Andreas about
this. He basically came up with the suggestion to turn
debian-multimedia at lists.debian.org from a *development* oriented mailing
list to a *user* focused list. This way users can share their thoughts,
concerns and kudos.

While I don't think that this will significantly lower the amount of
traffic (well, we actually widen the set of topics), I still think that
it will be benefitial for pkg-multimedia, because:

 - we get more contact with our actual users
 - we learn what's pressing and bugging them
 - we hopefully get more potential and real contributors, ideally even
   new developers


WDYT?

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4