Re: New mailing list?

On 06/24/2014 05:55 PM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> OSUOSL has not been a good source of resources for us.  We have tried
> (I've spoken with Lance personally a couple of times) and they are more
> overwhelmed than we are, generally speaking.  Email, sadly, is a time
> consuming business to be in.

Oh, too bad.

This is also probably why most third parties have stopped supplying ML
support for communities.

>> Personally, I have enough trust in Craig/Andres that if they say they
>> need a list, they need a list.  And if the list doesn't get used, it'll
>> be shut down.
> 
> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com