Re: [Nms-cgi-devel] nms project - moving forward

[Nicholas C. <ni...@un...>]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 04:35:41PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:

>   We have 65 people on the developers mailing list. But I think there
>   have been about five people who have answered a support question in
>   the last two months. I am, of course, eternally grateful to those 

> I also intend to make the developers mailing list closed. So that only 
> people who are in one of these support groups will be subscribed to the
> list.

Currently I'm subscribed to the developers' list. (Obviously, because I
have received and am replying to this message). I'm not aware of very
many people who have actually sent mail to this list, the proportion of
that 65 who are 100% lurkers seems quite high.

I'm very unlikely to join any of the support groups, as I don't have enough
CFT to do all the things I'm already doing, and it would be wrong to
volunteer to be part of a support group where I can't pull my weight. So
by implication of the above I would become unsubscribed from the development
list.

Avoid the special case, or exceptions are bad, m'kay.
And I can't see a way to say "hmm. non-lurkers on development are useful
and can stay subscribed"

I'm not sure if I'm actually adding anything useful to the development
process by semi-lurking on this list - development itself doesn't take place
as patches sent for code review to the list, hence there's not that much
whizzing by that I could comment on. Hence it's quite likely that the
development process won't lose anything by dropping anyone like me who does
actively read messages but doesn't actively develop or support.

I'm not sure if any of the other 60 odd people who are subscribed but never
e-mail would behave in the same way as I would for the developers list
becoming closed. I think NMS would reduce soureforge's outgoing mail traffic,
but I don't think it would gain any new support people. So I'm not convinced
what the benefit of closing the development list is.

Hopefully I'm wrong, and it would cause people to join the support teams,
but the silent majority here do seem to be silent, and have been over
recorded history, so I suspect they'd continue to be silent on support
lists.

Hello silent majority. :-) Hello echelon :-)

Khaddafi AK-47 Soviet Mena Uzi Area 51 North Korea Vickie Weaver Ron
Brown Croatian Vince Foster Craig Livingstone $400 million in gold
bullion genetic Watergate

Nicholas Clark