Re: Proposal for changes to gnome-announce

[Russell Steinthal <rms39 columbia edu>]

On Tue, 2002-08-06 at 02:58, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> So, a while back, there was some discussion about what kind of software
> announcements were appropriate on gnome-announce list, specifically with
> regards to the applist emails (which often had lowish quality info).
> 
> I think that gnome-announce should target casually interested users,
> onlookers and general press, which would require a change to the kind of
> stuff we publish there:
> 
>   - Major release announcements
>   - General developer/user news (GWN)
>   - Press releases
> 
> This leaves software announcements out of the picture, so an accompanying
> announcement list for releases of *any* GNOME related software should be
> made. This would be great for both distributors and really interested users.

Sorry to come to this so late, but I just caught up on about three
months worth of gnome-hackers mail which built up during final exams,
graduation, moving for the summer, studying for and taking the bar exam,
and then a post-bar vacation. :)  The last message in the thread that I
saw was August 11, so if a decision has been made in the last two weeks,
feel free to ignore this...

Anyway, my only thought is that the three types of "important"
announcements listed above are those which are generally blessed by the
Board, or at least a Board-blessed committee.  Why not use
foundation-announce for them, while leaving gnome-announce for its
traditional software announcement purpose?   (This ties into my longtime
question as to why the Board minutes are consistently cc:ed to
foundation-list and foundation-announce, when foundation-list is almost
certainly a subset of foundation-announce...)  

Ideally, I think it would be:

Foundation-announce: Important, relatively infrequent announcments which
would be of maximal interest (e.g. platform release announcemnents,
press releases, elections announcments)  This is already a list to which
all Foundation members are subscribed, and which could be low-traffic
enough for an interested journalist to subscribe to, for example, if
they were on the "Free software beat"...

Gnome-announce: General GNOME-related announcements (mostly software)

Gnome-hackers: Process-oriented announcements (e.g. freezes, release
team minutes)

The only things that are left out in that taxonomy are weekly summaries
and Board minutes.  I personally would stick the Board minutes on
foundation-list and perhaps gnome-hackers, since they're almost always
process-oriented, with summaries being OK for either foundation-announce
or gnome-announce.

I realize that's somewhat broader than the original proposal, but at
least it seems no less sane than the present system. :)  (And the Board
minutes question had been bugging me for a while anyway....)

Comments, including that I'm way too late to chime in on this, welcome
as always.

-Russell


-- 
Russell Steinthal <rms39 columbia edu>
Columbia University School of Law