On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 17:59 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote: > On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 19:40 +0900, Ryan McDougall wrote: > > Recently I've come to the conclusion that some debates here could use a > > little more civil, less personal, tone. 99.9% of the traffic here is > > pleasant to read, but occasionally there are mails that might be > > considered "flamey". > > > > Therefore I think its good for the health of this list to turn down the > > heat a notch, and realize that at the end of the day these battles don't > > mean all that much. > > > > I think we can self police our flame-throwers here, but if not, it would > > suck if someone had to be Flame Sheriff and constantly bug us to be nice > > to each other. Maybe then we could get some of those lost core > > developers to rejoin the list so we don't disconnect from them. > > I think they mostly left due to the low signal-to-noise ratio here. > There is such a huge amount of mails here, and very little of it matters > to them. On the whole I don't think the occasional flame we get matter > that much. > The problem is that not enough mails are interesting enough to dedicate > the hours of time needed for reading desktop-devel-list. So, in order to > get actual work done people are unsubscribing. Some of these are core > maintainers. This is pretty bad, since it means the core maintainers > don't have a place where they can reach each other. Honestly, I think you are exaggerating the problem here. There have been roughly 7000 messages on desktop-devel-list this year. That's a lot, but put another way, that's only 20 messages a day. 2-3 minutes if you read quickly, less if you skip messages in threads you don't care about. Certainly not hours by any standard. (d-d-l gets less traffic in a year than linux-kernel does in a month...) I don't think it's asking too much for a core GNOME maintainer to spend a couple of minutes a day keeping track of what's going on. I consider desktop-devel-list to be succeeding. It reduces the work of keeping track of the gnome desktop issues compared to having to watch a bunch of lists for stuff that might possibly have something relevant. And it's *vastly* reduced cross-posting. Have there been some big irrelevant threads? sure. Would it be good if people thought twice before posting a "me too" or a "not it isn't" mail? sure. I don't think it's worth a lot of hang-wringing or drastic changes. If anything, it's just that our mail reading environment isn't very good for handling this sort of discussion. Regards, Owen
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