Killing the gerrit to dev-list spam ...

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 08:28:47PM +0200, Jan Holesovsky wrote:
> Digest with N patches in a lump kills the possibility to scan the
> content quickly, so wouldn't work for anybody, and would be just a
> waste.

Hmm, it certainly would work for me, so I dont assume that to be a general
statement.

> Those who merge most of the patches should decide what works for them
> best I believe. 

Not quite -- you just as well have to accomodate for new blood as for the old
residents.

> that the 10 most active are Caolán, Fridrich, Thomas, Michael S.,
> Norbert, Miklos, David T., Tor, Andras, Olivier.

So removing those who are employed to work on LibreOffice -- which I expect to
be capable to set up their mail filters with a second list or with a gerrit
watch -- that leaves Thomas, Norbert and Olivier.

Of those, at least Thomas already stated: "I would prefer splitting it to a
gerrit list where the mails come as usual. Like libreoffice-commits... "
 
> Also consider the long tail here - how do you want to grow the amount of
> people who merge patches, when it will be hidden in gerrit only or a
> different / not default mailing list?

Yes, I am absolutely considering them here. And I heard repeated statements
from non-corporate contributors that the dev-list is too noisy to subscribe for
a casual contributor(*). According to the archive, the dev-list had 2288
messages last month, if you dont see how that is a HUGE barrier to entry and a
huge discrete step to dump 75 additional mails per day on your inbox for a
casual contributor in the long tail, I challenge you to seriously consider to
carefully reevaluate that. 

We have little problem gaining new contributors, but retaining them is more
tricky. Please consider how people not being able/willing to invest in a
monolithic 75 mails per day subscription plays into that.

Best,

Bjoern

(*) And that was both before and after we had gerrit (lots of manually
    generated patches before instead). Note also, that gerrit did not seem to
    have a huge impact in changing the total message volume on the dev-list:
    2288 mails in 2013-04, 1796 mails in 2012-04
    which is in line with the general project growth in this timeframe