Re: [OctDev] moving Octave Forge mailing list to core's mailman server

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 11/25/2012 11:47 AM, Carnë Draug wrote:
> On 23 November 2012 19:17, Carnë Draug<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > Hi everyone
> >
> > I'm proposing moving the current Octave Forge mailing list
> > (address@hidden) to the same server as as the ones
> > from Octave core. My suggestion is to have the following octave
> > related mailing lists:
> >
> > * address@hidden - same as now, discussion of development of Octave core
> > * address@hidden - new mailing list for discussion of development of
> > Octave Forge
> > * address@hidden - mailing list for discussion of any help related to
> > Octave (packages included)
>
> I spoke with JWE about this and he suggested to keep only the
> maintainers and help mailing lists, moving the development discussions
> of Octave Forge to the Octave core maintainers mailing list. That
> should avoid any confusion new users may have.
>
> I do not oppose to it, after all there's not that many Octave Forge
> only development threads.

Traffic fluctuates.  Sometimes one is more active than the other. 
Before combining these two, how about considering some alternate names? 
 I get both mailing lists at the moment.  I do like the separation for 
the reason you explained very well a month or two ago, i.e., folks tend 
to gravitate toward one list because it is too much to pay attention to 
everything.

To me, "forge" is simply too generic.  That the term "forge" may be 
common for other projects doesn't change that fact.  We feel these two 
are good:

address@hidden
address@hidden

As the third category, how about:

address@hidden
address@hidden
address@hidden

Any confusion could be cleared up as part of the Octave.org web page. 
Although the web page does explain matters well in terms of expected 
help, it doesn't present mailing list info in a succinct and clear way. 
 If instead the "Mailing Lists" info were organized either graphically 
or in table format:

address@hidden     address@hidden     address@hidden

    blurb                    blurb                       blurb

where the blurbs might be something like

help: For introductory and operational details slightly beyond program 
syntax.

applications: For advanced features such as packages and interface to 
other software.

maintainers: For programming specifics related to the core C++ code.

Now, if we want to combine bug reports for applications and maintainers 
in the same tracker, that's fine, but have a drop-down category that 
makes the distinction.  Also, for the HTML shortcut for 
"address@hidden" we could replace launching an email to a link of the 
explanation about expected help, i.e., a short little detour to help 
weed out beginners asking rudimentary syntax questions.  Put the email 
launch shortcut there.

Dan