Announcement: New lists.x.org GNU mailman list infrastructure

[Mike A. Harris]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Friday 11 March 2005 14:42, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> [...]
> 
>>I would like to extend a warm welcome to the community and
>>invite interested parties to participate in the new lists.x.org
>>mailing lists.
>>
> 
> [...]
> 
>>To see the list of available mailing lists, to get more
>>information about a particular list, or to manage your list
>>subscriptions and preferences, you may visit:
>>
>>         http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo
>>
> 
> [...]
> 
>>Welcome to the new lists everyone!
>>_______________________________________________
>>xorg mailing list
>>xorg at lists.freedesktop.org
>>http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
> 
> 
> Is it the intention to deprecate this lists.freedesktop.org server?

There seems to be a slight bit of confusion about the new
lists.x.org server, and the relationship of freedesktop.org
to X.Org so let me try to clarify some things, which may
help to understand the projects and related infrastructure
a bit better.

Both X.Org and freedesktop.org are each their own separate
standalone projects, and both projects have a need to have
mailing list infrastructure of their own to manage their
own discussion forums.

The Freedesktop.org server infrastructure hosts various
services including mailing lists for the Freedesktop.org
project itself, as well as hosting for various other open
source projects which are not part of the freedesktop.org
project.  Freedesktop.org's mailing list infrastructure will
continue to exist as long as the freedesktop project exists,
and it will probably continue to provide mailing lists and
other services to the projects hosted on the freedesktop.org
server.

The X.Org Foundation and its various projects and administrative
lists have officially been hosted at the "x.org" domain, however
there are "unofficial" or "defacto" lists hosted by
freedesktop.org and other places as well, such as
xorg at freedesktop.org for example.

The creation of lists.x.org, provides the X.Org project with
a new central place to host it's mailing lists under a single
umbrella, using modern GNU mailman software.  This will make
the official X.Org mailing lists much more accessible to a wider
community, than the previous x.org mailing list software, while
also minimizing administrative overhead of the list
infrastructure, and allowing for delegation of administrative
tasks easily to individual list admins, etc.

The administrators of individual X.Org related mailing lists
(official or otherwise) who decide to migrate their lists to
lists.x.org will presumeably make public announcements ahead
of time of their intentions to centralize on the lists.x.org
services.


In summary: Both X.Org and freedesktop.org are their own
individual projects which sometimes host other projects within
their hosting infrastructure.  lists.x.org is the new public
mailing list infrastructure for X.Org, while lists.freedesktop.org
is the mailing list infrastructure for freedesktop.org.  Both
of these will continue to exist, and neither replaces the other.
If any existing mailing lists decide to move to lists.x.org, the
admins of those lists will let the subscribers know about their
plans far enough in advance so people can tweak email filters,
etc.


 > If so, when?
 >
 > And will its archives be made available on the new server?

If any mailing lists decide to move to lists.x.org, their
individual administrators will post information about their
planned migration, and be able to answer questions of this
nature.

Hope this helps!