bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Glenn Morris]

Package: emacs
Severity: wishlist
Version: 24.5

(Bug report to remind about
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-12/msg00851.html)

Please create a mechanism to communicate important announcements
(feature freezes, etc) to emacs developers.
No-one should have to read (all of) emacs-devel, it's too noisy.
And the info-gnu-emacs list is not appropriate for this IMO.

FWIW, here's what I would do. It'd only take a few mins to set up:

1. Go to https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/admin/emacs-devel/topics

2. Enable topic filter.

3. Add topic name "emacs-announce"; regexp "emacs-announce"; description
"announcements all Emacs developers should read".
(Using just "announce" may lead to false positives?)

4. Document that developers should subscribe to emacs-devel and at
least subscribe to the "emacs-announce" topic. Whether or not they also
choose to "receive messages that do not match any topic filter" is up
to the individual.

5. Use "Keywords: emacs-announce" in the header of relevant mails.
Better (?) to use keywords: than the subject: header, to avoid all the
replies to said subject being sent out as announcements too. If you
forget to add it to a message, you or anyone else can just resend it.

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Stefan Monnier]

> 3. Add topic name "emacs-announce"; regexp "emacs-announce"; description
> "announcements all Emacs developers should read".
> (Using just "announce" may lead to false positives?)

I could live with that.  But I wonder if using gnu.emacs.announce would
be worse or better.  I mean, there might some benefit to "announce
feature freeze to the world" rather than only to the developers.


        Stefan

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
> Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 17:56:23 -0400
> 
> 1. Go to https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/admin/emacs-devel/topics
> 
> 2. Enable topic filter.
> 
> 3. Add topic name "emacs-announce"; regexp "emacs-announce"; description
> "announcements all Emacs developers should read".
> (Using just "announce" may lead to false positives?)
> 
> 4. Document that developers should subscribe to emacs-devel and at
> least subscribe to the "emacs-announce" topic. Whether or not they also
> choose to "receive messages that do not match any topic filter" is up
> to the individual.

Doesn't enabling the topic filter mean that every subscriber must
update their subscription, to choose the topics to which they want to
subscribe?

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Andreas Schwab]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Doesn't enabling the topic filter mean that every subscriber must
> update their subscription, to choose the topics to which they want to
> subscribe?

"If you do not select any topics of interest, you will get all the
messages sent to the mailing list."

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
GPG Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org>
> Cc: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>,  20389@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2015 19:22:33 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Doesn't enabling the topic filter mean that every subscriber must
> > update their subscription, to choose the topics to which they want to
> > subscribe?
> 
> "If you do not select any topics of interest, you will get all the
> messages sent to the mailing list."

Thanks.

I did what Glenn suggested for the mailing list changes.  One concern:
my reading of the "Topics" page is that the topic matcher scans the
_body_ of the message, so the suggestion to use "Keywords:
emacs-announce" in the _headers_ of the mail will probably not work.
Or maybe I misunderstood what Glenn meant by that.

I did nothing about item 4 in Glenn's message.

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Glenn Morris]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

>> 3. Add topic name "emacs-announce"; regexp "emacs-announce"; description
>> "announcements all Emacs developers should read".
>> (Using just "announce" may lead to false positives?)
>
> I could live with that.  But I wonder if using gnu.emacs.announce would
> be worse or better.  I mean, there might some benefit to "announce
> feature freeze to the world" rather than only to the developers.

But there's other stuff than the (relatively) interesting feature freeze
example. There's "hey, we don't use ChangeLogs any more";
"hey, start using 'foo' quotes rather than `blah' quotes";
"hey, remember to do your commit messages like this not like that";
etc. I think almost all announcements will not relevant be for info-gnu-emacs.
emacs-devel seems the natural home for such things to me.

info-gnu-emacs has 835 subscribers versus 200 committers;
don't know what the overlap is.

But the main point of this report was to get SOME kind of system.
If you want to make and advertise a different system, please do.
Eg https://pumprock.net/fsfstatus, s/fsf/emacs ;)

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Glenn Morris]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I did what Glenn suggested for the mailing list changes.  One concern:
> my reading of the "Topics" page is that the topic matcher scans the
> _body_ of the message, so the suggestion to use "Keywords:
> emacs-announce" in the _headers_ of the mail will probably not work.

Thanks for setting that up.
I can assure you that it works on real headers as well as "pseudo"
headers in the body. See eg help text at

https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/admin/emacs-devel/?VARHELP=topics/topics_bodylines_limit


Before this report is closed, the other aspects of it were:

1) Is that a system people are ok with using? It was just my suggestion.
2) If so, get it documented/advertised/used.

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>
> Cc: Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org>,  20389@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2015 13:21:37 -0400
> 
> 1) Is that a system people are ok with using? It was just my suggestion.

I guess we will see.

> 2) If so, get it documented/advertised/used.

It already is, see CONTRIBUTE.

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Stefan Monnier]

> But there's other stuff than the (relatively) interesting feature freeze
> example. There's "hey, we don't use ChangeLogs any more";
> "hey, start using 'foo' quotes rather than `blah' quotes";
> "hey, remember to do your commit messages like this not like that";
> etc. I think almost all announcements will not relevant be for info-gnu-emacs.
> emacs-devel seems the natural home for such things to me.

Right, makes sense, thanks,


        Stefan

bug#20389: A way to communicate announcements to developers

[Glenn Morris]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> 2) If so, get it documented/advertised/used.
>
> It already is, see CONTRIBUTE.

Oh thanks, I missed that.