Re: New mailing list?

* Josh Berkus (josh@agliodbs.com) wrote:
> > This *does not happen*.  Look at all of the PUG lists which we have and
> > can't be shut down because someone, somewhere, might email them some day
> > (and end up, most likely, not getting any reply- but that doesn't
> > matter).
>
> Point taken.  It's hard to kill off lists which are largely traffic-free
> today for political reasons.  Maybe we should have an auto-kill so that
> it doesn't have to be discussed?

Generally, I like the idea.  Sadly, it's not straight-forward to
implement, and it's fraught with danger of a political sense.  Far
better to avoid creating them in the first place (though, I agree, it'd
be great if we could create and remove them at need...).  We also get
push-back from community members for new lists (many of the folks on
-hackers don't want to be on *another* list, but if we put up one for a
popular feature, they're going to feel obligated to also be on that
list..).

> > The idea that mailing lists somehow provide "validation" for a
> > project simply needs to stop- it doesn't and it's better to have an
> > active-but-busy list with a lot of different discussions than lots of
> > low/no-traffic lists where people ask for help and get zero responses
> > back.
>
> That depends on the purposes of those lists.  Sometimes somebody just
> wants to collaborate with others without the "noise" of hackers or
> general, including collaborating with people who aren't interested in
> joining a 100-post-per-day mailing list because their interest in
> PostgreSQL is fairly peripheral and specific.

There are very few cases where I've seen this work.  I'm not saying it's
a great situation, but you're essentially asking someone else to filter
and sort your emails for you into the right email boxes that work for
you- and, really, that's just rock mangagement.  No one can know exactly
what you're interested in and what's relevant to you.  Things on
-hackers could be very relevant to BDR, but are discussed on -hackers
instead of some BDR list for a variety of reasons.  Perhaps someone will
think to include the bdr list, but I tend to doubt that's how it'll end
up happening.

> For example, with the pgsql-pkg-docker mailing list I just requested, I
> need to invite a couple folks from the docker project who will NOT join
> -hackers because they mainly work on docker. In that particular case, a
> more general pgsql-pkg mailing list would be fine -- it just needs to be
> something low-traffic.

Perhaps that would work for the specifics of how PG is packaged for
docker (though I have my doubts- ALTER SYSTEM is a capability that
packagers should be very interested in understanding and dealing with,
but we have not gotten nearly the interest around that feature from
packagers as I would have hoped..  It's starting to happen now, with a
new release coming, but it's really far later than some of these
discussions should have happened; and I don't think posting about these
things to the packagers list would have helped, but even if it would
have, no one *did*...).

> The alternative is for all of these folks to leave the postgresql.org
> infrastructure, which may be a win for the infra team, but it's not a
> win for the community.

Yeah, I'm really not buying off on this.  Their alternative should be to
use an existing list rather than pollluting the pg.org namespace with
lists for every little thing.  If they go off and create their
not-popular and not-used list on another provider, well, I don't think
the community or anyone else really ends up losing out on much of
anything.
Thanks,
    Stephen