Re: ANNOUNCE: Git Forum

From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
Date: Apr 11, 2008, 13:42 UTC
Message-ID: <slrnfvuqle.dqv.jgoerzen@katherina.lan.complete.org>
In-Reply-To: <46a038f90804081551u44d7b4cald5a00e74ee479dc1@mail.gmail.com>

On 2008-04-08, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 7:45 PM, Dill <sarpulhu@gmail.com> wrote:
>>  I have but as git grows more popular so will the users who wish to
>>  create communities that can help each other. IMHO this list will
>>  probably tend to be about development and bugs etc while other sites
>>  will sprout up geared more towards users. Could be wrong though.
>
> Do read the older discussions. Separating users from developers does
> not work well. Successful communities have mixed lists -- perhaps
> split by topic (linux-usb for example) but not by "participant type".
> Users should be guided towards this list --

I don't think this is right.

Debian has debian-user, debian-devel, and a host of other lists. Some are mixed (debian-kde), some aren't (debian-devel).

debian-user is extremely high volume. In fact, its volume normally dwarfs that of debian-devel. As a developer, it would be virtually impossible to participate in development discussions without having to spend an inordinate amount of time each day filtering out all the discussions about KDE icons or whatnot.

Not that these are *bad* discussions, or that developers never subscribe to -user, but there are some developers (such as myself) with limited time to devote to the project, and I feel my time is better spent on development than on filtering through 1000 messages each day that I'm not really interested in.

Moreover, as a *user* of some projects, I appreciate the distinction as well. I do not want to be a pest to the developers that are donating their time to improve the project I benefit from when my question could be perfectly well addressed by other users more experienced than I.

As an example, I subscribe to the MythTV user list but not the development list. There are all sorts of discussions there -- everything from what TVs are best in different situations to discussions over cable company encryption and setup of the MythTV web interface. I don't read most of them, but find some interesting. At the same time, I am not really interested in the latest SVN commits for MythTV. I upgrade my box maybe once a year and don't really care about development internals, so as a user, this separation benefits me too.

I don't see a -user list as a bad thing for a community the size of Git.

Think about it this way: once the Windows stuff for Git gets mature (to the TortoiseGit level), there are going to be a lot of people using Git that really *can't* operate a mail client because the only "mail client" at their disposal is Outlook.

-- John