Re: SPAM vs. open list

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Ean Schuessler wrote:
> Frankly, its not such a terrible burden to sign up for a mailing list
> and its not like -devel and -private are running low on mail from their
> subscribers as it is.

So, put yourself in the shoes of an upstream author. You've written some
program that is rather important and commonly used, and you get lots of
bug reports and clueless whining and so on. And you know that debian
includes your program, but that's really all you know about debian (you
prefer a custom bsd-ports-like system you have maintained yourself for
the past eight years, or slackware, or (god preserve us), red hat).  You
have mixed (and perhaps ill-informed) opinions about debian for various
reasons, and you've never really had much contact with the developer who
maintains your package -- the few bug reports he forwarded to you have
been utterly lost in the noise and you knew about the issues beforehand
anyway.

Then you find out that we're doing something horribly wrong with your
software. We have to be told how to fix this. So you try to get in touch
with us by the first place you find, which is the debian-devel list
mentioned prominently on the web site. And you get back some bounce that
says, "Frankly, its not such a terrible burden to sign up for a mailing
list (oh by the way, it only gets 200 messages a day or so)".

Well, what would you do?

-- 
see shy jo, who would be really annoyed if freebsd wanted him to sign up
            for some freebsd-ports list just because he has code in
	    there, and who can't remember the name of the nice guy from
	    freebsd who's sent him a bug report or two.