[wsf-c-dev] Moving SVN Commit messages

[James Clark]

>  My personal
> opinion is that having the commits going into the dev mailing list only
> makes the mailing list more important and increases the alertness
> required on the list.

Let me suggest that you are thinking about developers like yourself for
whom the list is a significant part of their jobs.  For this kind of
developer I would agree with you.  But that's not the kind of developer
that should guide the decision.  People like you will subscribe to -dev
whatever we do.  The people we need to think about are people outside
WSO2 who are a little bit but not a lot interested in the development of
the product covered by a -dev list; they are hesitating and trying to
decide whether or not to subscribe. These are the people for whom our
decision could make a difference as to whether or not they subscribe to
the -dev list.  Such a developer, I can guarantee you, will NOT be
interested in seeing svn commit messages.  If svn commits go to the -dev
list, the result will not be that such a developer subscribes and then
reads all the commit messages.  The result will be one of:

a) the developer decides not to subscribe to -dev at all

b) the developer subscribes and filters out the commit messages

     1. I think the result is much more likely to be (a) than (b).  In
        either case, the policy of making commit messages go to the dev
        list will have achieved nothing for the outside developers that
        we should be focusing on attracting.

By the way, filtering doesn't solve the problem that the archives are
made less useful by being cluttered with commit messages.  Also there
are other ways to look at commit messages (e.g. svn log).

James