Re: Rules proposal: Guidelines change announcement procedure

[alegre@mars.superlink.net (Fernando)]

I think you did not understand what I meant. I was referring to people who
join at some point in the future. Procmail works for people who already 
joined and sort their mail that way. But if John Doe wants to join tomorrow
and asks where is the policy written down so that he can review it, it would
be very wrong that we answer: Just look in Debian archives for subjects 
starting with "Rule...".

 On Sat, 4 May 1996 Dirk.Eddelbuettel@qed.econ.queensu.ca wrote:

> 
>   Fernando> E-mail is not enough because new maintainers will have a very
>   Fernando> hard time going through the e-mail archive hunting for messages,
>   Fernando> then sorting them out and trying to merge them adecuately. That
>   Fernando> is the perfect policy for discouraging new developers to join,
>   Fernando> which I think is against what we want.
> 
> I disagree. 
> 
> "procmail" serves me very well to sort throught the email bulk.  New
> proposals usually come to either debian-devel or debina-private, and in these
> folders do I keep them. Easy enough for a quick lookup.
> 
> But I agree with your point of a faster Guidelines turnaround. Maybe 
> we need a low-traffic list to announce new rules, or changes, to developers?

That is OK for _current_ developers, but the policy must be written down 
somewhere so that _prospective_ developers can read it. It would be 
unadvisable to just have a incoherent compilation of e-mail messages.
Think that a later announcement could cancel or modify a previous rule 
and this could create a lot of confusion for people reviewing the archive 
in search of the _current_ rules.


Fernando.