Re: announce@ == less email (FAQ item?)

> >ZenTest and ZenWeb were just released. I announced these to several
> >lists including this one. I'm sure many of you got multiple
> >copies. I admit that is annoying. These releases announce my LAST
> >announcements to ruby-talk@. I'll be announcing only to
> >[e-mail]. I urge every developer releasing ruby
> >scripts, modules, or anyone having ruby-related events to use this
> >as your primary means of announcing your information. It will cut
> >down on volumes of email that we get and make it easier to focus on
> >the work at hand.
> >
> >    http://lists.rubynet.net/lists/listinfo/rubynet-announce

Hey Joel, sorry for picking on your email but you phrased everything
just perfectly in the right quantities.

I read this thread out of curiosity because I'm hosting the
announcement list, and the sentiments of the nay-sayers finally got to
me after a few hours of thinking about it.  Immediately after I'd
finished reading my -talk mail, I archived my read or non-flagged
messages from ruby-talk and moved them into old-ruby-talk.  To reply
to this message, I had to open up a mail spool with some 35K messages,
ALL of them -talk.  I'm running a count of my mail spool at the
moment, I'll post the # of messages I've received in the last year and
a half... it's staggering and really sick, but, that frames my retort.
FWIW, 570979 msgs and in 18mo, that's about 1043 emails a day.  I
digress...

> Unfortunately, subscribing to it will only increase the volume for
> those of us who are staying on ruby-talk.

Honestly?  I don't really care.  -talk is close to -chat.  Most of the
35K emails to ruby I've scanned over because they don't interest me.
Not to say that what people are saying isn't interesting, just that
what they're talking about has little relevance or bearing on my use
of Ruby.

> And it will double the effort required to search archives. And it
> will make it harder for newbies to understand how the community
> works.

There's truth to this however it hasn't stopped PostgreSQL, FreeBSD,
Cyrus/sasl, MIT Kerberos, or any of the other zillions of other open
source projects.  Google's everyone's friend, let's just hope
archivers have sane robots.txt files and we're all set.  If this is a
big enough issue for folks, I'll archive the relevant ruby lists that
folks have interest in and will write a search engine for them.  This
shouldn't be a prohibitive reason for branching out the number of ruby
related mailing lists.

> Personally, I think ruby-talk is enough and don't think list
> proliferation is good for the community.

To the contrary, the lack of proliferation is bad for the community.
There is no notion of 'on topic' for -talk.  If I've got a busy day,
which most seem to be, then I want to prioritize what it is that I'm
reading, listening to, or watching.  I like FreeBSD's structure for
mailing lists because it lets me tune out the mailing lists I don't
have an interest in until I've got the time to read them.  As is, the
only TV I watch is Law & Order (original), I listen to NPR while I'm
in the shower in the mornings, and that's about the extent of media
exposure that I receive.  Every now and then I'll get a community news
paper in the mail, but I only glance at it as I'm walking to the
recycle bin.  I like that I can filter and prioritize out all of the
discussion and bits in my world that I don't care about.  I know I'm
not alone.

With my developer hat on, I only use Ruby and C/Ruby.  With my DBA hat
on, I only use PostgreSQL and BDB.  As a sysadmin, it's FreeBSD.  I
work hard to be good at what I do and enjoy staying informed of what's
going on in each of those communities.  When I read my email, I read
it in the order of 'inbox', 'cvs commit lists for projects I
maintain', 'cvs commit lists for the products I use', '-announce
lists', '-bug lists', '-security lists', '-bug lists', '-hacker
lists', '-admin lists', '-audit', '-arch', and generic user lists some
where down at the bottom of the pile.  -talk, however, doesn't fit
nicely into that stratification.  -talk is the bug list, is the
security list, is the -hacker list, is the -admin list, is -arch list,
and up until recently, used to be the -core list.

Honestly folks, I don't care about what Larry Wall driveled out in an
attempt to promote Perl6 (and as a result stepped on Ruby) and I don't
care about overloading methods or even private variables, sure they'd
both be nice to have, but the amount of time that I spend thinking
about ways of enhancing Ruby is close to 30sec out of every month.
Matz, Nobu, Guuy, and other folks have got a pretty good handle on
things and I just assume let them continue to work on the core ruby
interpreter and not fielding obtuse questions that, while interesting
to talk about and discuss and spawn some very interesting discussions,
really only fill up my -talk box and take time for me to mark as read
while skimming the subjects.

I think that there are other people in the world who use ruby
commercially and aren't on -talk (probably because of its volume and
they are time constrained).  For the people who are are actively using
ruby in the work place, I bet dime to dollar they would have a HUGE
interest in a thread about a bug that shows up in tight iterations
wherein the GC that leaks 4bytes every GC sweep and corrupts memory in
adjacent memory addresses.  Just yesterday I did well over a million
dynamic page views using mod_ruby and inserted some 30M rows of
data... having this bug squashed is VERY valuable and interesting to
me and getting this in front of the people who are busy/using ruby
commercially would aid me and other ruby core developers in solving
the problem.  As it stands, I think this bug has gone unreported
because no one who is pushing ruby to its limits wants to deal with
the volume of -talk.

> In any case, I would like to see the announcements. Is it possible
> to automatically forward from rubynet-announce to ruby-talk? Then
> people could choose whether to subscribe to one or the other,
> without missing anything, and without getting duplicates.

Absolutely....  the duplicates issue is a tad tough to manage though.

> Also, about the name: some people might get the impression that the
> rubynet-announce list is for announcements related to the rubynet
> project. Why not call it ruby-announce?

rubynet's getting bigger in its scope.  rubynet is just a network of
ruby services, it's not limited to just the rubynet
module/package/CPAN project.  That said, I will gladly setup new
mailing lists for any interested ruby users.  I will set the lists up
under any one of the following domains (this is not limited to English
speaking lists!!!  fr, ru, jp, mx, es, etc. are all very very
welcome!):

rubynet.(net|org)
rubydoc.(net|org)
rubydev.org
ruby-support.org

I'd like to second zenspider's plea to have developers use the
announcement list for announcing modules, etc.  Here are the two lists
that I imagine are of use to people at the moment:

List:	   [e-mail]
Subscribe: http://lists.rubynet.org/lists/listinfo/rubynet-announce
Archives:  http://lists.rubynet.org/lists/listinfo/rubynet-announce

List:	   [e-mail]
Subscribe: http://lists.ruby-support.com/lists/listinfo/ruby-developers
Archives:  http://lists.ruby-support.com/pipermail/ruby-developers


I'd like to startup a lists dealing with, but not limited to XML, XSL,
network programming, and database usage.  Please let me know
(privately) if you have an interest in said topics and mailing lists
on each.

-sc


PS Again, this isn't to say that -talk doesn't host wonderful
discussions about development, programming, or other obtuse
discussions.

-- 
Sean Chittenden