ADMIN: What's on topic and what's not.

[David Faure]

After Dirk's reaction on Marc's message (which I find partly unjustified, but we 
discussed the matter at length in private so I won't rehash this here), I'd 
like to ask for a bit of better behavior from everyone, concerning
which list to mail about which topic.

The huge thread about what the GPL says was off-topic for kde-core-devel, 
very clearly. kde-licensing at kde.org still exists, and I regret now that I didn't say
anything at the time because I bought the "kde-licensing is dead" argument.
The number of people who participated in the thread shows that there's definitely 
enough interest for such a list, so please, everyone who said something in that 
thread: subscribe to kde-licensing, now, so that the next such discussion can
really happen there.

Other off-topic threads, with the right list for them:
* "usability" proposals, like moving things around in KControl for the 100th time => kde-usability.
* multimedia framework / replacing arts => kde-multimedia at kde.org   (*)
* sysadmin requests => sysadmin at kde.org
* defining on policy on file-sharing applications in KDE => kde-policies at kde.org  (*)
* undebugged bug reports (e.g. "out of disk space..." thread) => bugs.kde.org
* and yes, I'll agree with Dirk that posts about optimization should go to kde-optimize at kde.org
in general, even though IMHO informative posts that try to convince people to care
about optimizing and writing good C++/Qt/KDE code are on-topic for kde-core-devel's 
larger audience - it's those who replied wrong facts that were wrong :)

* and I think that concerns about whether a thread is on-topic for the list 
should be mailed to the list admins, not directly on the list, since that only adds 
more noise (if everyone starts posting "this is off topic" we basically get twice more noise).
Reminder: the address for reaching the list admins is <mailinglist>-owner at kde.org,
not <mailing-list>-admin at kde.org (strange mailman feature).

kde-core-devel remains the place to discuss things that affect all KDE-CVS developers,
which is not only qt+kdelibs+kdebase, but also other things like module
organization, build system, kde-cvs-wide goals or decisions, releases, changelogs etc.

(*) : I understand that the starting point for those threads was initially 
on-topic for kde-core-devel, but as soon as the central point of the discussion
changes, the thread should move, without too much cross-posting.
After the first "moving discussion" crosspost, please move along with the thread, 
this seems to be very difficult for most people...

If you want kde-core-devel to remain interesting for everyone to read, ensure 
that you use the other lists when appropriate.

David, co-k.c.d-admin

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).