Too many mailing lists

[Warren Young]

The Cygwin project has too many mailing lists.  This causes an 
unjustifiable amount of friction.

Every time someone says "That's not on topic here, go elsewhere," it can 
easily be read as "Go away."  The Cygwin project should only be pushing 
away toxic people, and multiple mailing lists do not have that happy 
side effect.

We're long past the days when server-side list traffic segregation made 
sense.  With today's powerful mailers and search engines, we no longer 
need lots of mailing lists to manage the flow.

I see real value in only 3 lists:

   1. User discussions
   2. Development of Cygwin-the-project (broader than the DLL)
   3. Talk

Specifically:

1. User discussions: Everything now allowed on the licensing and apps 
lists should be allowed on the main list.  Posts on use of Cygwin/X and 
Cygwin Ports should be welcome, too.  Nontechnical packaging questions 
should be allowed, if only to encourage more Cygwin users to adopt packages.

2. Development of Cygwin: I propose that the -devel list be the place 
for anything that affects -- or potentially *can* affect -- one of the 
Cygwin project's code repositories.  The only good reason to separate 
the Cygwin DLL traffic has to do with legal matters, and that cut 
doesn't have to be made at the mailing list level.  Legally, all that 
matters is what's checked into the winsup/cygwin section of the CVS 
repo, and that's covered by policy and permissions.  Discussions 
involving changes to setup.exe, the docs, the web pages, the scripts 
running things behind the scenes, etc. all should be allowed on -devel. 
  Patches and commit messages, too; they're easy to filter out.

3. Talk: I'm in favor of keeping this one as-is only because of 
restrictions in some work environments.  I'd prefer to live in a world 
where a little off-topic chatter was okay on the main list, but I will 
concede that it's worth segregating the "vulgar and unprofessional" 
threads if it keeps more people subscribed to the main list.

I am uncertain about -announce.  It echoes to the main list already; 
that part of its value could be replaced by asking package maintainers 
to prepend [ANNOUNCEMENT] to subject lines.  It may be the case that 
there are a large number of people who choose to subscribe to this list 
and not to any other Cygwin list.  Do the statistics bear this out?  If 
not, it is not providing much value.




More generally, I believe that threads should be allowed to continue 
where they started, no matter what a wall-of-text web page -- clearly in 
low regard -- says.  As long as the discussion is productive, does it 
really matter where it happens?  The purity of each list's archive has 
little value in this modern world.  I don't believe Google makes 
distinctions between pages it finds under cygwin.com/ml based on which 
list the post was sent to.



This proposal greatly simplifies the decision about where to post.  Is 
it completely off topic?  TITTL.  Does it affect the development of 
Cygwin the project?  Send it to -devel.  No to both?  It's probably of 
general interest, then, so it should go to the main list.

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