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Does anyone think that mailing lists would be useful to VDrift's development? Most of the development discussion that we have goes on over IRC or AIM, or on these forums. Maybe some folks prefer e-mail, idunno - it certainly is a more 'traditional' way for open source software development to take place.Advantages:<ul><li>discussion is archived publicly (unlike IRC)<li>everybody uses e-mail, some may not prefer forums or chat<li>discussions can take place over an unbounded time frame - doesn't matter if people fail to check the web site or aren't on IRC, they still get the messages they want to see, and can read them at their convenience.</ul>Disadvantages:<ul><li>SF.net mailing lists will have to be used since web host can't provide mailing lists (university firewall won't deliver mail to our server). Not sure if this is really a bad thing.<li>Development discussion will probably not happen on the forums much more, and anyone wanting to contribute to these discussions will have to join the mailing list, a bigger barrier to entry than just signing up for the web site. (again is this really such a bad thing?)<li>This may discourage use of IRC, and developers needing to ask others questions may have a longer time to wait for answers, possibly slowing down development a little.</ul>Tell me what you all think. If we do set up SF.net mailing lists, the question arises of how many, and for which people - should we have just a development list, or should we have one for users too?
I like mailing lists better than forums and IRC. SF does not have my favorite mailing lists but that's fine if that's all we have.
ok so i don't see a whole lot of people jumping and shouting for this, and since we're kinda constrained to sf.net mailing lists, for now we'll put this off...
There's no point putting up mailing lists (and reducing forum, irc traffic) unless there's a real need to.One of the big problems for small-community open source projects is the appearance of inactivity. The more mediums available, the more inactive each medium appears. Stick with what people use unless there's a geniune reason to do otherwise.