[oe] Discussion regarding the future of OpenEmbedded mailing lists

[Martyn Welch]

Hi All,

This email is mainly targeted at those who are subscribed to the "openembedded-users" mailing list, who are not also subscribed to the "openembedded-devel" list.

There has been a proposal on the openembedded-devel mailing list to re-organise the lists provided on openembedded.org. The re-organisation has been discussed as part of a larger discussion into the procedures that are used to review patches/changes to Openembedded, that aim to make the process more efficient and transparent.

A proposal has been put forward to merge a number of the mailing lists. There are currently 7 OpenEmbeddded mailing lists with the following purposes:

Openembedded-announce - (no description available)
Openembedded-commits - Commits to the OpenEmbedded metadata repository
Openembedded-devel - Using the OpenEmbedded metadata to build Distributions
Openembedded-issues - OE Issues
Openembedded-stablebranch - Discussion and review of changes to the stable branch and its policy
Openembedded-users - Using OE
Openembedded-private - (no description available)

The role each of these lists is currently poorly defined and in some cases either a list has too few knowledgeable/key subscribers to properly answer the questions asked, have overlapping objectives or would better serve the larger Openembedded community by being merged into a more active list. The proposal is to merge the list to form 3 better defined lists:

Openembedded-devel - for humans to post patches and ask questions
Openembedded-commits - commits, bugs, logs, etc
Openembedded-private - core team

The plan (as I understand it - please correct me if I'm wrong) is to:
* Close OpenEmbedded Announce, It seems to have received no traffic since April 2007.
* Merge OpenEmbedded-issues into Openembedded-commits. This list will be for fairly verbose automated messages and as such high traffic.
* Merge Openembedded-users and Openembedded-stablebranch in to Openembedded-devel. This will form a single list for the discussion of changes and issues regarding the Openembedded platform and to ensure all users and developers are aware of up coming changes and have a chance to be involved in any discussions. It is believed this will also aid with spotting changes that should be ported from the development branch to the stable branch and visa-versa.
* Retain Openembedded-private for private core-team discussions.

Initial support on Openembedded-devel has been very positive, though the views of those subscribed on the Openembedded-users list are also important. Objections, suggestions and support for these plans are welcome.

Martyn

-- 
Martyn Welch MEng MPhil MIET (Principal Software Engineer)   T:+44(0)1327322748
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