A while back I changed the roundup config to make darcs-devel nosy on all
issues, so that all issue comments would appear on the mail list. There was some
discussion, but I thought we were in agreement. This is no longer working. Did
it regress, or get reverted ? David ?

Hi David and darcs folk,

I'm letting this go to darcs-user, since right now that's the only place 
we have where mail replies just work. David I see at 
http://bugs.darcs.net/user17 that you did revert this, two days after 
the change. Can we discuss that some more ?

What's the problem with having issue comments (and other changes) appear 
  on darcs-devel ? In my view the point of having an email-integrated 
bugtracker is to let us discuss issues by email, while still collecting 
those comments on the issue page and allowing web comments to be part of 
the discussion as well.

Your change makes this impossible; right now it's hard to discuss issues 
since most people hear only fragments of what's going on. This makes the 
bug tracker much less effective and a less appealing place to spend time.

Can we hear a consensus on this and can we revert your revert ?

Thanks,
-Simon

We already have a feature that allows interested users to get all bug
messages, and I think that is sufficient, and I don't want to get all
bug messages.

In general, when a feature has been discussed and decided upon, it requires
agreement rather than silence to make a change.  This was something we talked
about and decided on when we first set up the bug tracker.  I seem to recall in
the more recent discussion that I had pointed out that if we made this change I
would unsubscribe from darcs-devel.  Since I didn't think that was your intent
in making the change, I reverted it instead.

David

On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 12:28:43PM -0000, David Roundy wrote:
> We already have a feature that allows interested users to get all bug
> messages, and I think that is sufficient, and I don't want to get all
> bug messages.
> 
> In general, when a feature has been discussed and decided upon, it requires
> agreement rather than silence to make a change.  This was something we talked
> about and decided on when we first set up the bug tracker.  I seem to recall in
> the more recent discussion that I had pointed out that if we made this change I
> would unsubscribe from darcs-devel.  Since I didn't think that was your intent
> in making the change, I reverted it instead.

On further thought, it seems that this feature (the ability to receive only
the new bug emails) is almost the only reason to keep darcs-devel going.
The other reason is the poor quality of the buildbot emails.  If we could
solve those two problems, by adding a mechanism  for users to request email
on new bugs (something akin  to All, but limited somehow) and the buildbot
stopped sending false alarms, we could just send the buildbot messages to
the bug tracker (where they ought to go, if they really do relate to bugs)
and then disable darcs-devel, and tell folks who want bug messages to use
the bug tracker to do so.

This would both reduce the sysadmin burden, and encourage prospective
developers to familiarize themselves with the bug tracker.

David

Two other options I was thinking of were to (a) send issue creations to
darcs-users and (b) to ressurect darcs-devel as the place where patches go.  

It would probably be good to consult the list, providing specific numbers of the
mailing list trends (divided into bugtracker, patch and discussion perhaps)

On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 10:44 AM, David Roundy <bugs@darcs.net> wrote:
>
> David Roundy <droundy@darcs.net> added the comment:
>
> On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 12:28:43PM -0000, David Roundy wrote:
>> We already have a feature that allows interested users to get all bug
>> messages, and I think that is sufficient, and I don't want to get all
>> bug messages.
>>
>> In general, when a feature has been discussed and decided upon, it requires
>> agreement rather than silence to make a change.  This was something we talked
>> about and decided on when we first set up the bug tracker.  I seem to recall in
>> the more recent discussion that I had pointed out that if we made this change I
>> would unsubscribe from darcs-devel.  Since I didn't think that was your intent
>> in making the change, I reverted it instead.
>
> On further thought, it seems that this feature (the ability to receive only
> the new bug emails) is almost the only reason to keep darcs-devel going.
> The other reason is the poor quality of the buildbot emails.  If we could
> solve those two problems, by adding a mechanism  for users to request email
> on new bugs (something akin  to All, but limited somehow) and the buildbot
> stopped sending false alarms, we could just send the buildbot messages to
> the bug tracker (where they ought to go, if they really do relate to bugs)
> and then disable darcs-devel, and tell folks who want bug messages to use
> the bug tracker to do so.

My first thought, is that the bug tracker is currently a hidden
mailing list.  A lot of important and useful discussions go on in our
bug tracker and it wasn't until I found out that I could make myself
nosy on all changes that I started finding out what was going on in
darcs development.

The buildbot emails are currently useless to anyone who doesn't have
push permissions.  I want the buildbots, I encourage the buildbots, I
think they are important and the right thing.  I just wanted to point
out that to me they are 100% ignorable at the moment as I can't do
anything about their success/failure.  I actually use filtering rules
in my email client to mark all the buildbot emails as read as soon as
they arrive.  I have mentioned this to Zooko and as far as I know he's
working towards a setup where people like me can pass my patches by
the buildbot before submitting them.  In a world like that I could see
myself caring about buildbot emails.

Getting back on topic, if we're going to continue using roundup as a
mailing list, perhaps we should advertise it to users and developers
as such.  I strongly suspect very few contributors know that they can
make themselves nosy on everything nor do I imagine they realize the
value of doing that.

Regardless of how many mailing lists the darcs project adopts or
abandons I find I need to be subscribed to all of them if I want to
stay current and have access to the big picture.

Jason

Roundup's nosy feature, while interesting and sometimes preferable, is not
equivalent to a mail list/gmane archive. It requires that you register with the
bugtracker, that you adjust Your Details -> Nosy Topics to "All". Then you'll be
auto-subscribed to issues created after that point. You don't get subscribed to
the existing issues. To stop listening you have to find and remove yourself from
every issue you're nosy on. 

I don't agree with David's change, but it's true the combination of nosy lists
and mail lists and the darcs project's and david's mail needs makes it possible
to differ on what the simplest and best setup is. I'm going to let others tackle
this area for a bit.

PS and the big issue, when discussing bugs there's no consistent way of knowing
who sees what when. Every time you reply to an issue comment, you either just 

- accept that it will be seen right away by those who have accidentally or
deliberately become nosy on that issue, and later or never by others

- go to the web page, scroll through the nosy field, think about who might need
to be added, and add them before sending the mail

> Getting back on topic, if we're going to continue using roundup as a
> mailing list, perhaps we should advertise it to users and developers
> as such.  I strongly suspect very few contributors know that they can
> make themselves nosy on everything nor do I imagine they realize the
> value of doing that.

Perhaps we could implement this on darcs-devel by making the list signature
include text like:

Want to hear more about bug reports?  Make yourself nosy to 'All' by configuring
'Your Details' on http://bugs.darcs.net

(of course, rewritten to be easier to follow)

Options (not all mutually exclusive):
 A. wont-fix
 B. add darcs-devel back to nosy
 C. add a roundup 'detector' to mail all changes to darcs-devel
 D. add a note about the bug-tracker to mailing list sig
 E. add ability to be creation-only nosy

I think we should rule out (E) because it's likely to be too much work

Comments

1. Clearly we need nosy lists around at least for the original reporter and
other people who may not be on the list.

2. This change would make bug-tracker activity more visible at the cost of
higher traffic.  Visibility is good.

3. A lot of bug-tracker activity is just admin noise, like the Issue Manager
changing the title of bugs.  Noise is bad.

4. I happen to agree with Karl Fogel when he says we discourage people from
having discussions on the tracker (Link to Producing OSS later).  I am slightly
afraid that doing this will lead to that sort of thing.

5. It sounds like we were partly using the lack of mailing list output to
'encourage' people to use the tracker... which sounds a little odd.

Heads up: I'm planning on flipping the switch so darcs-devel is nosy again. 
It'll probably just be on a provisional basis.  Try and see.  In the meantime,
I'm leaving this open for comment.

OK: making darcs-devel nosy on all tickets.  Complaints to darcs-users please.

Just an FYI: Now that darcs-devel is nosy, I've disabled the newissuecopy
detector which systematically sends a copy of new tickets to darcs-devel.

We could consider re-enabling that later to send them to darcs-users at the risk
of increasing the noise a bit.

Also: if you're currently nosy on all issues, this may be a good time to get out
and perhaps request removal from tickets.  We have a script to automate it. The
nosy list will still be good for people who want to hear about specific topics
or who tickets.