Moin!
I investigated our lists a little bit. It is my understanding that
the Debian project should serve mailing lists on lists.debian.org that
help establishing and running the project. It is also my
understanding that the lists served on this list server should be
active. Depending on the topic of a list the number of subscribers
range from a handful of people to several thousands. Concluding I
believe that we should clean up our list server a little bit when
lists expire, i.e. are no longer used.
My investigation showed that there are quite some lists that are not
used (anymore), but that have people subscribed. I watched the lists
for about three weeks. There are lists that are of very low traffic
which is intended, so they were ignored. So the following list only
contains lists that have *no* traffic during the last three weeks and
which I'd consider not very low traffic.
If nobody objects, I'm going to remove these lists at some point in
the near future:
Name Subscribers
debian-admintool >1,000
debian-autobuild[1] >400
debian-bugs-reports[2] >1,300
debian-ctte 170
debian-ctte-private 1[3]
debian-devel-games 400
debian-dpkg-bugs 70
debian-freshmeat[4] 890
debian-l10n-hellas[5] 15
debain-partners[6] 7
debian-pool 200
debian-snapshots 260
opensource-publicity 3
other-gnomehack[7] 160
sourcedoc 2
lcs-eng 450
lsb-confcall 4
lsb-desktop 0 <--- !!!!!
lsb-eng 25
lsb-vendor 70
spi-license-review 2
-------changes...
I'm not sure if these lists serve their purpose. The description says
that they should contain notices about uploaded binary-$(arch)
packages for the stable distribution. However, I'm not sure if
.changes files will be distributed over all relevant lists. Well, I'm
quite sure it doesn't work, instead. The archive tells me that there
were some mails distributed in march. However, both, uploads to
stable and a new stable release (2.2r3) were done later.
Thus I'm pondering if these lists have their reason to stay or not?
Name Subscribers
debian-all-changes 300
debian-alpha-changes 50
debian-arm-changes 50
debian-hurd-i386-changes[8] 100
debian-i386-changes 170
debian-m68k-changes 25
debian-sparc-changes 40
There are even more debian-*-changes lists that have no traffic. The
description says that they should serve notices about uploaded
packages for the unstable $(arch) distribution, mostly from buildd's.
Do no-messages imply that there is no buildd running but should or
that the list is not needed anymore?
Name Subscribers
debian-devel-alpha-changes 30
debian-devel-arm-changes 30
debian-devel-hurd-i386-changes 130
debian-devel-i386-changes 190
debian-devel-powerpc-changes 60
Regards,
Joey
[1] 1 real mail, other spam + unsubscribe
[2] Well, mails are sent to the list frequently, but they are >400kB
large, so they are not distributed by our list server. Also they
are growing in size instead of being splitted. This requires a
sane solution.
[3] One single subscriber: Ian Jackson. Charter: "Private
communication between tech committee members."
[4] There has never been a proper debian-freshmeat repository and
never will be, maintaining it would be a pain additionally. I'm
pretty sure this list is fully expired.
[5] The first and only mail on this list was from Joy, saying that he
has renamed `hellas' into `greek' in the webwml tree. We're not
providing personalized lists for maintainers one-shot-use, do we?
[6] This list is not even mentioned in our lists overview...
[7] The last valid mail was from June 20
[8] Since when has hurd-i386 become stable? Not that I wouldn't like
it but I guess this hasn't happen yet, thus there has never been a
reason for this list to exist anyway.
--
Never trust an operating system you don't have source for!
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