I agree with Ted about the importance of mailing lists.  Mailing lists
are the "Apache Way."  The only time I have used off-llist
communication is during an infrastructure move where we needed to
rapidly complete several steps in a short period of time.  Even then
the basic outline of work was agreed to in advance on the mailing
list.

Mailing lists may seem outdated but they are the lifeblood of the ASF
and they continue to serve us well.  There may be more rapid ways of
communicating (phone calls and internet chat come to mind) but these
are exclusionary.  The community is world wide and people have day
jobs.  It takes a little longer to hash things out over email but
everyone gets to participate this way.

The result is a single archive that is publicly searchable and
contains all relevant decisions (no matter how trivial) in one place.

My .02

Sean

On 1/17/06, Patrick Lightbody <forum-struts-dev <at> opensymphony.com> wrote:
> Ted,
> I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but you seem to imply that I don't have any experience with this sort of
stuff. I do.
>
> We too at OpenSymphony use mailing lists quite heavily (as does every other decent open source project out
there). However, as technologies like RSS have grown more popular, we adapted. Now we get our wiki changes
and CVS changes through RSS (Confluence and FishEye both provide RSS feeds). We also offer the option of
email messages, but that is up to the individual.
>
> Conversations still continue around wiki changes and commits. For those that subscribe to the mailing
lists, they simply forward the message to the dev list. For those that don't, they simply post a new message
asking, "John, can you explain why you changed Foo.java yesterday?".
>
> Try to understand where I'm coming from: the wiki and commit changes aren't interesting to me (I don't have
time to look through any of them). Not just for Struts, but for WebWork too. Instead, I do weekly reviews.
With Struts, I just delete those messages as they come in. And when I look at the forums:
>
> http://forums.opensymphony.com/forum.jspa?forumID=34
>
> I see "NO NOT REPLY" and "[Struts Wiki]", making it just as difficult for me to keep up with the other
conversations. I didn't mean to imply that those messages sometime don't spur a conversation, but
pragmatically 99% of the chatter I've seen does not come from them.
>
> I definitely understand where you are coming from, and I hope you can see where I'm coming from. Often when
people have different work behaviors, the best bet is to provide more options. This can be done by somehow
allowing individuals to opt out of those generated emails. I hope we can do something about this.
>
> Patrick
>
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