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Re: Package mailing lists

Hi Iustin,

Iustin Pop wrote:

On Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 03:48:35PM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>  - I've made the "private email aliases considered harmful" point [10],
>    in a somehow unrelated thread. I ask you to watch out for interactions
>    in Debian that could happen only through private email addresses.
>    There are some cases where they are warranted (e.g. security or
>    privacy concerns), but having regular activities of a team going
>    through private email aliases harms us in so many ways. Please point
>    me to project areas that could benefit from improvements on this
>    front, ... unless you can just go ahead and fix the issue!

Sorry for reviving and old email. To what extend do you think this
should apply - even at individual package level?

I ask this because of the following: recently I had a 1-1 discussion
with a co-maintainer of one of my packages, which went between our
personal emails. I quite disliked this (since it will be buried in our
mailboxes), but email conversations seem simpler than going through the
BTS for all discussions.

On the other hand,http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/PackagingProject
discourages requesting Alioth projects for smaller packages, so in that
sense it encourages people contacting directly the maintainers via their
emails, instead of having the archived, indexable lists.
For what it's worth, although that page may not encourage requesting an Alioth project, I don't really see it as discouraging requests of Alioth projects. 
Could/should Debian make it easier for each package to have an own email
list (i.e. making it easier to have "1-person team maintenance")? Or is
BTS enough? (I don't think so, since it doesn't have a simple canonical
entry point for all packages)
I also don't think the BTS is enough. The BTS is an *issue* tracking system. Development communities don't just need discussion of "issues", but also long term discussions on orientations, architecture talk, etc. Yes, Debian can and should make it easier to have discussion channels for packages. Not sure what's the best/most practical way to implement it, but I think by default each package should have a public discussion channel. I'm not very familiar with Alioth, but I think it should likely be part of the solution.
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