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On Sun, 2019-07-07 at 21:30 +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote: |
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> In two weeks from now, the newly elected Council will have its |
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> constituent meeting. This is the time to raise and prepare items that |
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> the Council should put on the agenda to discuss or vote on. |
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> |
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> Please respond to this message with agenda items. Do not hesitate to |
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> repeat your agenda item here with a pointer if you previously |
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> suggested one (since the last meeting). |
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> |
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My second agenda item is: removing posting restrictions from gentoo-dev |
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mailing list. |
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I was on the Council that made those changes, and from retrospective I |
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believe the decision to be a mistake. It was made to workaround |
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a problem with inefficiency of ComRel, and we should have focused |
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on fixing ComRel instead. I don't believe it serves its purpose well |
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and IMO it causes more problems than it solves. |
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Notably: |
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1. People (including developers) workaround it via posting to -project. |
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As a result, the correct split on topic of those two mailing lists is |
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disturbed. |
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2. The majority of 'blocked' -dev posters are helpful *users*. We ought |
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not to put unnecessary obstacles because of few harmful entities. |
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3. Some processes, in particular ebuild, user/group addition review etc. |
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require posting to -dev. This makes it unnecessarily painful to proxied |
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maintainers who need to request adding it. |
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4. In fact, I ended up as top committer to whitelist repo, and that's |
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because I've been adding proxied maintainers to it. The sole fact that |
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so few people are being added shows that people resign from posting |
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rather than request being added. |
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All that considered, I don't that the whitelist approach works. It |
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only: |
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a. discourages helpful people from posting, |
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b. adds unnecessary work on developers who have to update the list, |
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c. breaks list topic separation. |
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Therefore, I would like to request the Council to vote on removing |
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the whitelist and reopening the list to public posting. |
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-- |
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Best regards, |
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Michał Górny |
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