Re: Processing of .changes, and an ominous message.

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@mit.edu>]

>>>>> "James" == James Troup <james@nocrew.org> writes:


    James> <rant> FFS, what is with people insisting on mailing a list
    James> of 1600 odd people when a) 99% of them won't care and b)
    James> 0.06% of them can actually do anything about it?  There's a
    James> reply address on the mail.  It has a human's name on it and
    James> it is read by a human.  Please use it.  </rant>

I don't know about others, but:

1) I do not believe in mailing to humans about problems.  Humans get
    busy, move jobs, etc.  Problems should be mailed to role
    addresses.  Thus, I'd much rather mail debian-admin, ftpmaster, or
    something like that than a human.    

2) Mail should go to  archived and preferably public lists.  It lets
   you see how issues are handled ; it lets people hold those
   responsible for  performing some task accountable for their
   actions.  It lets those who want to know  what is going on do so.

3) Getting potentially global problem reports on public lists  lets
   interested parties judge the scope of those problems.  Note that
   those interested in debian-admin's activities are not the same as
   those on debian-admin.

That said, I'm not sure that I would have mailed this complaint to
debian-devel; it seems somewhat broader than necessary.  However, I do
wish there was a public version of debian-admin, or bug packages for
this sort of discussion.