"Craig R. McClanahan" wrote: > > On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Bojan Smojver wrote: > > > Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 08:59:27 +1000 > > From: Bojan Smojver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > To: Tomcat Dev List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Subject: Mailing list proposal > > > > I have subscribed myself to Tomcat User list a few days back with the > > intention to help a few people on it (given my +1 on TC 3.3 final). I > > have to say that the amount of e-mails and sometimes the superficial > > nature of them prevented me from actually doing any useful work. Don't > > know about the rest of you guys, but I really can't go through 200 > > something Tomcat e-mails every day, just to weed out the good questions > > from the bad ones. > > > > Tell me about it :-). > > I've gotten to the point where it takes < 15 minutes to weed out the 90% > of the questions that I'm not interested in (or don't know enough to) > answer and then delete 'em. But the "interesting" questions can still be > pretty time consuming.
That's a pretty good weed-out time. I'm not that efficient. And the prospect of reading 200+ messages every day is not very appealing. > > Although Tomcat Dev list is usually kept to the point, I think the > > amount of traffic on it warrants a change too. > > > > So, at risk of being ridiculed or flamed, I propose this: > > > > 1. Tomcat User list should split into Tomcat 3 and Tomcat 4 lists > > I don't really like this idea, for the following reasons: > > * It relies on users understanding which list to use. While > the version they are running is a lot more rational than > some of the ways that have been suggested (i.e. Beginner vs. > Advanced), you'd be amazed how many people don't know which > version they are using, and don't know how to find out. :-) That's exactly one of the reasons I would introduce the split. The users would be forced to check before they ask. Along the lines of http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html. > * Lots of users use both, especially if they are faced with > transitioning a pile of already-deployed apps. Yep. I agree. But most of the time questions are version specific. At least from what I've seen on the list. > * Lots of issues are common to both (i.e. all the generic > servlet/JSP programming things), so you'll get lots of > cross-posts anyway. True. But generic things can be answered on any list by any developer familiar with the technology. Many of those question fall into the category of 'bad' ones anyway. They are mostly the result of not doing the RTFM. > * Lots of question-answering developers would need to subscribe > to both anyway (see below for that). I don't see anything wrong with that. Given that it's then very simple to have tc3/tc4 mail delivery split in your MUA/MSA, every developer would know up front what they're dealing with, without the need to read first. And they could focus on what they want to deal with first (ie. some people are primarily TC4 people, like yourself, while others are primarily TC3 people, like myself). > > > > 2. Tomcat Dev list should split into Tomcat 3 and Tomcat 4 lists > > > > I really don't (note the intentional inversion :-) like this idea: > > * It's taken a long time for TOMCAT-DEV to get to the point where > we basically thought we were all on the same team. Splitting lists > would tend to undo that. I had no political agenda in mind when I proposed this. I guess we could always have tomcat-pub, to get together and have a few laughs :-) Personally, when I'm ready to take on TC4 I will. The fact that I'm now primarily a TC3 user (and rookie developer) doesn't separate me from the rest of the crowd. Or at least I don't see it that way. > * Now that 3.2 is basically done, and 3.3 is about to go final, > lots of 3.x developers seem to be ready or willing to work on > both, so they'd have to subscribe to both anyway. Again, the same thing as with user lists. > * Fewer issues would get cross posted due to relevance to both, > but there's still quite a number of them. Many of those are J-T-C issues, since mod_jk is now used on both. But, yes, you're right here. There would be some cross posting. As with anything else in life - it's a trade-off. A good one, in my view. > > 3. There should be Tomcat Connectors lists as well (both Dev and User) > > since there are many questions related to connectors alone (and j-t-c is > > a separate beast in CVS these days anyway) > > > > I'm not sure that the way CVS is organized is all that compelling a reason > to organize the mailing lists. You do these things for different reasons. > At any rate, I don't mind seeing the developer traffic about connectors > even though I'm not directly involved in those efforts. My understanding is that current association of connectors with TC's is going to be deprecated in favour of separate J-T-C. If that's the case and since J-T-C seems to be a totally separate project, a separate list seems in order. There are people that use connectors and there are the ones that don't. Why burden people that don't with irrelevant messages? > > 4. There should be a web form for submitting serious questions to Tomcat > > User list. This form would force the users (that really need developers > > attention) to fill in all relevant information, rather then just ask > > superficial questions which create a lot of noise on the list. The page > > http://jakarta.apache.org/site/mail.html should make it clear that > > questions submitted through the form would probably get more attention > > then other 'user-to-user' questions. It would be easy for the developers > > to recognize and respond to 'properly formatted' questions, rather then > > waste time on browsing through hundreds of e-mails every day. > > > > It's certainly technically feasible to do this. > > Are you volunteering to set this all up, be the moderator, and hound > developers until we answer the questions? :-) I don't see any major dramas with it. The interface should resemble Bugzilla but without the tracking support. A few Velocity pages and a couple of beans should be enough. Do you know of any good containers we could run this in? ;-)) As for moderation, I didn't have that in mind. The messages sent by the form would be clearly different to all other messages, so developers would be able to see them easily. That's all. Just like now we can see all messages coming from Bugzilla. I didn't plan on hounding developers. I think that the system itself would make sure more questions would get answered by developers. Most of this has come from my totally different experience with Velocity User mailing list. There are fewer messages and fewer developers answering questions, but most of the time users get a good response in minutes. Now, TC is not a product like Velocity that mostly experienced, renegade JSP-ers use, but I think reducing the traffic and separating good questions for the bad ones would encourage more developers to pay attention to the user list. As it stands, I think many of them avoid it because they perceive it as a bloated mess. That's my opinion, at least. Bojan
