[wsf-c-dev] Moving SVN Commit messages

[Chamikara Jayalath]

Hi All,

I agree with James in that not all developers are interested in commit 
messages and sending a lot of commit messages through lists will cause 
outside developers and users to refrain from joining our mailing lists.

But also svn commit messages are an important part of the development 
work we do and I strongly believe that a developer who is interested 
should get all those through mailing lists.

When a person initially joins a dev list, his main intention will be 
having a look at the discussions that are going on. Having a lot of auto 
generated messages may cause him to loose the actual discussions and he 
may certainly not think of subscribing to other WSO2-dev lists which 
will cause sending more and more commit messages to him.

So my suggestion is that a person who is initially joining a dev list 
should only get the discussions. But when he comes to a stage where he 
wants to see the commit messages as well (we r in this stage i guess :-) 
), he should be able to get that enabled. This can be a switch for the 
same mailing list or a different mailing list (I prefer the first one).

Thanks,
Chamikara


James Clark wrote:
>>  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
>
>
>
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>
>   

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