On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 10:42:02AM -0400, Sam Ruby wrote: > For years, shepherds were responsible for communicating back to PMCs, > but this was sporadic. From what I can see, centralizing this to > something the Secretary does consistently has proven more effective. > > Perhaps you are suggesting that the emails sent by the secretary > "spoof" the shepherd? If so, I think that would be confusing.
Putting my director hat down for the answer: I've been on the Mahout PMC for quite some time. Paint me ignorant, blame me for not reading the docs - it took me attending several ApacheCons to understand the purpose of writing board reports. It took me making an addition myself to understand the mechanics of writing board reports. To understand the whole shepherding concept needed me actually being involved with the board and getting an introduction to how things work from the other side. So to summarise: Assuming we want the comments we make to reports relayed to the projects I honestly don't care how that is done for as long as it happens reliably, if there's some automatic way of doing so, +1 even if this means having to update http://www.apache.org/foundation/governance/board.html#organization In my limited personal experience automated stuff tends to happen more reliably than manual stuff. As for which mail address should go into the From: header: I would personally prefer having mails not forge the From: header to be my mail address - I would find it irritating to receive such a message myself. Having the secretary in there IMHO makes sense, especially with the explanation footer suggested below. > Finally, I don't see how this addresses the original question, which > asked about where responses should be sent. > > Perhaps the content of the emails should contain a standard footer > that says that questions can be addressed either by responding to the > email (for urgent matters) or by addressing the feedback in the next > scheduled report (for all other matters)? +1 from my side. Maybe the footer can contain a link to further resources answering common questions (where should answers go, where are comments coming from, who is behind the initials?). Wrt. to putting shepherds on CC - nice idea, though in the interest of a "what didn't happen on the mailing list didn't happen" level of transparency I'd rather see replies on board@ as opposed to private inboxes. Isabel
