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

[Cornelius Schumacher]

On Thursday 19 February 2004 20:38, David Faure wrote:
> 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.

I would like to propose to add this email (maybe in a condensed and a 
bit more formal form) as "KDE Mailing List Policy" to 
http://developer.kde.org/policies/index.html.

We might want to also add a word about cross-posting.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org>