Moving mailing lists to @gwtproject.org?

[Matthew Dempsky]

So I just setup groups.gwtproject.org so that we can create mailing lists under @gwtproject.org if desirable.  Also, since "google-web-toolkit-contributors" is incredibly long and no longer reflective of the projects name, it seems like a good time to fix that too.

I was thinking:

    gwt-d...@gwtproject.org (formerly google-we...@googlegroups.com)

    gwt-c...@gwtproject.org (formerly google-web-tool...@googlegroups.com)

    gwt-st...@gwtproject.org (formerly gwt-st...@googlegroups.com)

but I'm open to other suggestions too.

I'll look into whether it's possible to migrate the existing groups cleanly, but I might have to just create new groups, import the existing members, and disable posts to the old groups.

[Jens]

I dont have a strong opinion on it. So technically I dont really care if its @gwtproject.org or @googlegroups.com. Whats more important to me is that if a switch is made then it should somehow be assured that people using Google to search for GWT questions/answers do not end up in a dead end. For example if I find a good thread on @googlegroups.com and I can not reply to further ask things it could be kind of annoying. So I would vote for migration and hopefully Google will adjust its search results over time.

I think it could be beneficial to create a fourth group that is used by Gerrit so gwt-contrib doesn't get spammed. Something like gwt-review or gwt-commits. That way gwt-contrib could be used exclusively for more low level technical discussions as well as for discussion the GWT steering group came up with. Finally the GWT Steering group can use their own gwt-steering group to announce / publish / document their final decisions on the topics they are currently dealing with (obviously read only).

-- J.

[Stephen Haberman]

> Also, since "google-web-toolkit-contributors" is incredibly long and no longer
> reflective of the projects name, it seems like a good time to fix that too.

Makes sense.

> gwt-d...@gwtproject.org (formerly
> google-we...@googlegroups.com )

In the spirit of friendly bikeshedding, how about stripping the gwt-
prefixes, since it's already in the domain name?

I was going to propose moving to more typical users@ and dev@ list
names, since that is what most open source projects use.

And that might be a good idea, but I'll admit that newbies often see
"dev@" and think "well, hey, I'm a developer, I'll post here", when
really their post belongs on user@.

- Stephen

[Stephen Haberman]

> I think it could be beneficial to create a fourth group that is used
> by Gerrit so gwt-contrib doesn't get spammed.

I believe the idea is that gerrit can send out emails (either for
specific commits or you can subscribe to the entire project), so there
shouldn't be a need for a commits@ list.

- Stephen

[Jens]

 Ha, should have checked Gerrit settings I guess :) Well if that works out well, then I am fine with having no commits@ list. Instead we could just add some extra info about Gerrit and its e-mail notification support on the new shiny gwtproject.org site.

-- J.

[Matthew Dempsky]

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 8:44 AM, Stephen Haberman <ste...@exigencecorp.com> wrote:

> Also, since "google-web-toolkit-contributors" is incredibly long and no longer
> reflective of the projects name, it seems like a good time to fix that too.

Makes sense.

>     gwt-d...@gwtproject.org (formerly
> google-we...@googlegroups.com )

In the spirit of friendly bikeshedding, how about stripping the gwt-
prefixes, since it's already in the domain name?

I was considering that.  It is slightly redundant, but I think it's nice to keep the option open to create other foo-discuss or bar-contrib mailing lists if the project grows and splits into independent subprojects.

Also, fortunately "gwt" is pretty short.  It could be worse; e.g., "chromi...@chromium.org". ;)

I was going to propose moving to more typical users@ and dev@ list
names, since that is what most open source projects use.

And that might be a good idea, but I'll admit that newbies often see
"dev@" and think "well, hey, I'm a developer, I'll post here", when
really their post belongs on user@.

Yeah, I'm torn on that too and for the same reason.

But I'd also like to avoid the name "gwt-users" just because that's also the name of Google's internal GWT users mailing list, and using the same name just makes it more likely that a Googler accidentally confuses the two.

[Matthew Dempsky]

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Jens <jens.ne...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ha, should have checked Gerrit settings I guess :) Well if that works out well, then I am fine with having no commits@ list. Instead we could just add some extra info about Gerrit and its e-mail notification support on the new shiny gwtproject.org site.

I'm +1 for using Gerrit to subscribe to which changes you're interested in, rather than just CC'ing every notification to a mailing list.  I setup the latter just to keep feature parity with Rietveld, but I think Gerrit's subscription mechanism is more finegrained and gives users better control.

But if nothing else, we can definitely split the Gerrit emails onto a different list so gwt-contrib is less noisy for normal discussions.

[Stephen Haberman]

> It is slightly redundant, but I think it's nice to keep the option open to
> create other foo-discuss or bar-contrib mailing lists if the project grows and
> splits into independent subprojects.

True; I like being optimistic about future growth. :-)

> But I'd also like to avoid the name "gwt-users" just because that's
> also the name of Google's internal GWT users mailing list, and using
> the same name just makes it more likely that a Googler accidentally
> confuses the two.

Hehe. Selfishly, I'd love to see more conversations from that internal
list happen here.

Obviously I understand that, with an internal list, you can reference
internal paths/code snippets/secret projects/etc. that you otherwise
would not want non-Googlers knowing about.

But for the more generic stuff (which would be some/most of it?),
having more knowledge sharing happen publicly would be awesome.

- Stephen

[Matthew Dempsky]

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 7:46 AM, Stephen Haberman <ste...@exigencecorp.com> wrote:

True; I like being optimistic about future growth. :-)

:)

Hehe. Selfishly, I'd love to see more conversations from that internal

list happen here.

Obviously I understand that, with an internal list, you can reference
internal paths/code snippets/secret projects/etc. that you otherwise
would not want non-Googlers knowing about.

But for the more generic stuff (which would be some/most of it?),
having more knowledge sharing happen publicly would be awesome.

Heh.  We do try to encourage reviews to be done externally as much as possible, and especially now that we're committing to Gerrit directly that's even more the case.  Also, if an internally discovered bug looks to be a general issue and not something specific to Google, we try to encourage filing external bugs rather than keeping it internal.

But otherwise knowledge sharing among our internal users tends to focus on integrating with Google's internal infrastructure requirements, and so probably isn't really useful externally.