[asterisk-dev] Mailing List Future

Wed Dec 13 08:12:22 CST 2023

Hello,

honestly, I don’t understand the point of this discussion anymore. Probably all the people that somehow are interested in keeping the mailing list spoke up by now. Almost all were in favour of keeping the list. Some people also offered help in hosting the list in the future.

If it’s your decision as asterisk project manager to shut down this list, then just do it. If the asterisk project does not care about the opinion of their independent contributors and developers in this matter to save some operations costs, that is unfortunate but understandable. In the end it shows the value of this open-source community for the project. Everyone must then decide if moving to a proprietary communication solution is acceptable.

Best regards,

Henning Westerholt

From: asterisk-dev <asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com> On Behalf Of Joshua C. Colp
Sent: Mittwoch, 13. Dezember 2023 14:42
To: asterisk at phreaknet.org
Cc: Asterisk Developers Mailing List <asterisk-dev at lists.digium.com>
Subject: Re: [asterisk-dev] Mailing List Future

On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 9:21 AM <asterisk at phreaknet.org<mailto:asterisk at phreaknet.org>> wrote:
On 12/13/2023 7:55 AM, Joshua C. Colp wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 8:45 AM Jonathan Simpson
> <jsimpson at jdsnetwork.com<mailto:jsimpson at jdsnetwork.com> <mailto:jsimpson at jdsnetwork.com<mailto:jsimpson at jdsnetwork.com>>> wrote:
>
>     The mixed content is useful.
>
>     Learning about stir shaken updates, useful. Would that have been
>     in a github notification? Would the subject line be parsable?
>
>
> My inquiry was strictly regarding release notifications and security
> advisories. If discussions were done in GitHub then it would have been
> a GitHub notification and parseable if you opted to receive them.

I'll point out another issue with this as well. This assumes we're just
talking about the "asterisk" repo here, and friends, but the
asterisk-dev list has become the catch-all list for most discussion of
anything development related in the entire Asterisk family of software,
particularly as most of the other lists died a long time ago.

Some people have turned it into that, yes.

For example, in what repo should discussion of wanpipe take place? Some
of us might want to discuss issues with or trade patches[1], but there
isn't a wanpipe repo since it's not an "open source project". Or general
discussions that might cross over into multiple repos at once, like
something that affects both Asterisk and DAHDI Linux, or both DAHDI
Linux and DAHDI Tools? Should everyone now watch the asterisk-test-suite
repo too? There are a lot of edge cases this doesn't handle well.

I think it's also worth pointing out that, while I'm not one of these
individuals, there are a number of people that don't have a GitHub
account (and perhaps might not want one) that would be excluded if all
discussion was happening there. This very point came out when the
project moved away from Atlassian and there were comments to that effect
*on this list*. These people would have been completely unheard if
discussion had also moved to GitHub prior to that. Do you want to
intentionally exclude them now?

Some people I've noticed also subscribe to the digest version of this
list. I could be wrong but I doubt GitHub discussion has a "digest"
mechanism... because it isn't a real mailing list with all the options
of a real mailing list.

Sometimes people see something on the mailing list and reply privately
to the OP to continue a specific point of discussion off-list. On GitHub
discussions, where everyone is identified by their GitHub usernames and
not real names or email addresses, getting in touch with someone could
be considerably more difficult, particularly for people who might just
be looking at the discussion online.

And frankly, I think expecting 2100 people to reply to this thread is
downright unrealistic. On no mailing list ever does everybody
participate. The majority of mailing lists are dominated by the
discussion of a few while the rest sit back and listen (which is
perfectly fine), maybe 5% of posters generating 95% of the posts. Some
people don't want to contribute, but they do want to read. Nobody has
come out and said he or she wants the mailing list to go away or give
way to another format, and lack of a response is *not* tacit approval of
doing so. All the stakeholders that have spoken out are against the
decision.

I'm not expecting 2100 people to reply. What I'm trying to get is more people to respond with how THEY use the mailing lists. Your opinion is yours, and is how you want to use the mailing list and what you want get out of it. It's a factor in things but you don't speak for everyone. Everyone is different and understanding what people are actually expecting out of the mailing lists is important. So far what I'm seeing is people using it for announcement type stuff, with the odd discussion here and there, and as a way to get some insight into development.

So hypothetically speaking if a new mailing list were to be created but the existing subscriber list could not be preserved, would people sign up again?

--
Joshua C. Colp
Asterisk Project Lead
Sangoma Technologies
Check us out at www.sangoma.com<http://www.sangoma.com> and www.asterisk.org<http://www.asterisk.org>
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