Re: package maintainers please choose a package group

[Carnë Draug]

On 15 March 2017 at 16:09, Julien Bect <address@hidden> wrote:
> Le 15/03/2017 à 16:41, Carlo De Falco a écrit :
>>> Julien Bect wrote:
>>> More generally, I think that we (admins) should have a simple and systematic
>>> way of reaching *all* package maintainers.
>>>
>>> I suggest either of the following two options :
>>>
>>> a) Ask that all package maintainers should be subscribed to the
>>> address@hidden
>>>
>>> b) If this list is considered to have too much traffic by some, perhaps
>>> should we create a more specific, low-traffic list, dedicated to
>>> general-purpose communications between OF admins and OF package maintainers
>>> ?
>>
>> Search the archives to see the reason why such list, that once existed, was
>> shut down and merged to the maintainers list.
>
> Since you seem to know the answer, why don't you just tell me ?
>

There was never an Octave Forge developers mailing list.  There was a
general purpose Octave Forge mailing list, kinda like core's help and
maintainers mailing merged into one, but for OF only.  It's archives
are still online [1].

The reason was to bring the two communities together and avoid
fragmentation.  Here's the whole thread discussing the mailing lists
[2] and the final announcement after discussion [3].  I think this was
around the same we moved to savannah, to share the same bug tracker
(I'm not 100% sure when that happened).

When it comes to provide help, it doesn't matter if it's help with
core or functions with a package.  Users often don't even get that the
function they are having problems comes from a package, and it's not
nice to send to another mailing list.

For developers, a lot of discussions mattered to both core and forge
developers so even though my initial proposal was to have a forge and a
core maintainers mailing list, in the end we merged the two.

This was more than 4 years ago, and the core maintainers mailing list
is a lot more active now.  Part of it I feel are things that ought to
be on the bug tracker or on the help mailing list, but even without
those it might still be too much for some package developers.

Maybe an OF announcement mailing list could be created for those
maintainers that can't follow the core maintainers mailing list.

Carnë

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/mailman/octave-dev/
[2] 
https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/mailman/octave-dev/thread/CAPOrs_2wz4XnHJ_H%2B1d3QWzXQMv4Kb3vz1418mO%2BRAu0B8JgTw%40mail.gmail.com/#msg30137075
[3] https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/mailman/message/30152424/