Killing the gerrit to dev-list spam ...

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Wed, May 01, 2013 at 09:33:49PM +0200, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> depending on time of day you find 50-90% patch mails on there. As the writer of
> mail forward I have been repeatedly asked if we can kill this spam.
 
so collecting the feedback so far, here is a proposal:

- move the gerrit mails to a separate list
  - since we now have an opt-in channel, we also mail about comments to changes
    on that list, not only if there is a new proposal
- in addition, aim for a daily digest to the dev-list

The separate list would then be even more verbose, but gerrit has already very
good headers to filter upon. Personally, I dont think it makes sense to have
manually generated patches go to the separated list:
- they require a different workflow
- they might get lost in the gerrit mails, while the wont be missed on the -dev
  list
- most of these will be by firsttime contributors:
  - good to have these patches very visible and with a quick response
  - firsttimers will mostly ignore our fancy thoughts on different lists anyway
    and most likely send to the dev-list, we should welcome them (and not start
    their experience with "you send this to the wrong list")

I will try to set up the separate list in the next
two week and move stuff there. For the digest, I will use the stuff of:

 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51159
 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/dev-tools/tree/scripts/gerrit_daily_digest.py

as base and turn it on when moving the other gerrit mails to the separate list.
If you want the digest to look different, just improve on that script in the
meantime. ;)

The situation in the end will be:
- a casual observer will see the dev list with a daily digest
- a more involved dev can subscribe the gerrit patches mailing list and can
  then filter it to his hearts delight
- since that list is more verbose and also contains the comments, it will be
  more complete and also solve Lionels "change media and context"/"current
  mails are just enough to be painful, but not enough to really help" issue

Best,

Bjoern