On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 11:43:40PM -0400, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
> However, after digging through numerous documentation pages[2], it is
> now unclear to me that there is a concensus over the user of
> lists.debian.org for such local groups, even though the wiki page says
> otherwise. For example, the dug-muc (munich) request has been
> rejected[3] and the dug-nyc request seems to be on hold, mentionning
> that the proper place is on teams.debian.net[4].
Let's separate two aspects that got intermixed in the bug report you
mention.
There's been a "heated debate" between two persons about whether a
specific group ("debian muc") has decided to migrate lists to lists.d.o
or not. The tones reached in the debate are not particularly nice, and
that's something I prefer not to read in Debian bug logs. But hey,
people occasionally fight and get mad at each other, for all sorts of
reasons. Let's move on that and hope debian muc could calmly decide
where to best host their mailing lists.
But from that, it does not descend that there is no consensus on the
usage of lists.d.o for hosting local group lists. I've a flaky
connection ATM and can't find the reference, but listmasters have
decided in the past that they're fine hosting such lists, and the
*-dug-* namespace exists for precisely that purpose. Executive bottom
line: local groups lists are fine on lists.d.o.
A related matter is that of local group granularity and, as a
consequence, the "structure" of the *-dug-* namespace (is it country
based? province? city?). Listmasters have decided to implement a country
based scheme, which is why Alexander has tagged as "wontfix" the request
specific to the Munich area, even after Martin closed the bug.
I've reviewed over time the local group structure of other large Free
Software projects, and the country-based granularity is a popular one;
similarly popular is the "exception" of considering USA states as
"countries", due to the typically high population density, Free Software
penetration there, and the very large territory that would result by
considering USA as a single country (not really "local" anymore for the
common purpose of organizing F2F events).
I think it *would* make sense to consider similar exceptions also for
other cases, but it need to be done in a systematic way. Listmasters
could have people voting for group creation, as it happened back in the
usenet days (and as I think it happens for other lists). They'd also
need to have a sane naming scheme; country-vs-city naming risk becoming
pretty nasty otherwise. This is something which is up to listmasters to
decide (as they'd do the related list maintenance work), but it is
simply a matter of exceptions to a default granularity rule that already
exists. It is by no means about "hey, we don't want local group lists on
lists.d.o".
Cheers.
PS replying where you posted, but -project would've probably been a
better list for this discussion...
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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