[fab] State of Fedora (a long email)

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Rahul Sundaram schrieb:
> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> Rahul Sundaram schrieb:
>>> Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>>>> Well, this list is invitation only, 
>>> Others do send mails to this list. It is moderated.
>> Didn't know that. And it seems that fact is not documented in the wiki
>> or the list's front-page.
> There is even a alias setup that people can send mails to. 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board#Contact. I have explicitly added a 
> note now.

Thx -- in an ideal world
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
and
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board-readonly
would mention that fact, too. But well, the wiki should suffice.

>> And it failed. 
> I believe it is still only contributors who are signed up there.

The problem is not that there are "still only contributors signed up
there", the problem is that contributors did not get signed up there or
left again after some time/send the traffic to /dev/null now because
there were flamewars or unimportant stuff was discussed.

Site note: To solve this problem Extras requested a moderated,
low-traffic "fedora-maintainers-annouce" list to make it possible to
announce stuff to a all maintainers easily. Core blocked it, warren (in
his function as FESCo member) is discussing this with Jesse currently
(maybe there are some results in between, but nobody told me about).

> So let's admit that and change something

Needs a new name IMHO, as the current one has quite a bad fame already.

>> (fedora-maintainers has quite a bad fame now already, so changing its
>> behaviour will probably not help much).
> If contributors flame each other, even a contributors only list like 
> -maintainers is going to be a less pleasant place.

We'd probably should have jumped in and made the list moderated for two
days when the last flamewar happened. To late now.

>> Further: cvs_cladone and cvs_extras/a @redhat.com mailing list address
>> are two different things.
> Yes. Fedora-maintainers is all contributors. Not just extras.

That's news to me (I'm a list admin there since some weeks -- I
requested that after I noticed that new members tried to sign up there
but were never accepted and gave up after some time). And look at
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-maintainers
Quoting: "This is the list for maintainers of packages in Fedora Core
and Fedora Extras."

So no, Fedora-maintainers is not all contributors, it's just
"maintainers" (hence the name)

>> I want a general mailing list cleanup of what has grown in the past
>> years -- get rid of some old cruft here and there. I think the
>> end-result could be two or three lists less and a better communication
>> experience for everyone.
> More details?

Quick and dirty braindump:

- merge fedora-test into fedora-devel -- people often don't get the
difference in any case
- rename fedora-maintainers to fedora-contributors or fedora-project --
all people with cla_done get permitted, moderated for nearly everybody else.
- start using fedora-maintainers-announce (see above)
- delete:
 - fedora-config-list -- mostly dead, and people did not understand what
its use in any case
 - fedora-patches-list -- dead ?
 - fedora-tools-list -- mostly dead?

Site note: We should create a rough mailing list guideline for Fedora,
as it is highly confusing that the lists are configured quite
differently (reply-to munging , Tags in the Subject the two most [only?]
important things).

CU
thl