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RfD: Removing mailing lists



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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