I spent the morning giving some consideration to the comments people made regarding the merging of the mailing lists. As with most attempts at an optimization, there are cases that get more efficient and cases that get less efficient. If done properly, the important cases improve in efficiency while the cases that are less critical end up a little less efficient. Clearly, there are two classes of users on the mailing lists: those who read it and those who read it *and* actively contribute to it. One of the key goals behind merging the lists was to make it more efficient for those who have to reply to emails to not have to deal with duplicated content, since in reality a large portion of the emails come from people who want their device to work, and don't even know the differences between acronyms like ATSC, QAM, DVB-T, DVB-C, analog, etc. Looking at the people who have responded to this thread, and the number of threads they have actually contributed on in the last year, the disparity is obvious: People "in favor" of the lists being merged 118 Patrick Boettcher 205 Hans Verkuil 38 Mike Isely 196 Devin Heitmueller "hundreds" Mauro Carvalho Chehab People "against" of the lists being merged 2 Lars Hanisch 17 user.vdr 16 Klaus Schmidinger 2 Bob Cunningham 10 Tomas Drajsajtl 17 Ales Jurik Yup, it's the developers who are posting on a regular basis who feel the pain of the two different lists. It's the people who are actively replying to issues, dealing with problems, and trying to keep track of it all who want the lists merged. That said, I personally don't feel any guilt in inconveniencing a few users who are not contributing if it makes it easier for the people who contribute to the list on a daily basis. I would love to hear more from people who have contributed to more than 20 threads who think having the two lists are a good idea. I doubt there will be many of them. I was also giving some thought to the notion of a having separate lists for users versus developers. While this works in some communities, I am not confident it would be appropriate for ours. Why? Because the notion of a "users" list is only useful in cases where you have a large pool of users who are willing to answer questions for others. Look at the back history of the v4l and linux-dvb lists, and that is nowhere to be found (aside from a few people like CityK). The vast majority of questions are answered by a handful of developers, and it is no more convenient for those developers to have separate lists. In fact, it's less convenient since it results in the developers being required to watch both lists. Think of all the projects where the "-dev" list is high traffic, but almost all of the traffic on the "-users" list goes unanswered. Do you want a separate users list and you're not a developer? If so, volunteer to help out by answering other people's emails if you know the answer. CityK is a shining example of this - every email he answers about one of the devices I did the driver for is an email I don't have to answer myself, which allows me to spend more time writing drivers. If we see lots of users helping each other out by answering the questions of other users, only then will I see a "-users" list as a sustainable idea that is worth pursuing. Devin -- Devin J. Heitmueller http://www.devinheitmueller.com AIM: devinheitmueller -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-media" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
