The cross-project-issues-dev mailing list is, effectively, the communication channel for the Eclipse IDE simultaneous release
The past many years the cross-project-issues-dev mailing list has been the communication channel for those project team that participate in the Eclipse IDE simultaneous release. Stated a different way, this mailing list is not cross all projects, but rather cross some projects.
If one wants to communicate with all committers, then one should use the eclipse.org-committers mailing list.
Participation in the cross-project-issues-dev list is entirely voluntary. Committers, contributors, community members, whoever, ... must explicitly subscribe to that list to participate. Participation in the eclipse.org-committers list is mandatory and all committers are automatically subscribed.
I believe that there is some confusion that the cross-project-issues-dev list has a more general audience. While I believe that we can argue that targetting the more general project community was the intention, it does not reflect the reality. I'm concerned that this creates some confusion.
@droy @mbarbero @mward @thomasfroment please check my assumptions.
Changing the list name feels like far more work than it's worth. I'm thinking that we should at least update the description to something like:
The communication channel for committers, contributors, and community members working on the Eclipse IDE simultaneous release.
Activity
Thank you for raising this @wbeaton , I fully agree with you: it actually creates confusion, also agree with your proposed solution
I don't think this is really simrel list, even though it might looks like this as simrel topics are often things that can affect many projects, actually there is
https://accounts.eclipse.org/mailing-list/simrel-dev
already, should we not instead promote this list more and ask that project leads should register to that list to be informed about general topics that might affect them? (I don't say require because there is actually no way to ensure the content is actually read and understood).
Sending a mail to all committers if likely something I never would do ... This sounds really disruptive.
FYI @emerks
added service:mailing-list label
added Cross-Project label
I agree that the purpose of the cross-project-issues-dev mailing list can be confusing.
I'd propose the following:
- move all simrel related discussions (milestone and release announcements, joining/dropping from simrel, etc) to simrel-dev and make it a requirement for projects that participate in the simrel to have at least one responsible person subscribed (can be the project lead, or release engineer, etc)
- promote cross-projects ML to all projects and auto-subscribe all project leads (other committers are free to subscribe), this would help to spread project-related announcements, but at the same time not bother 1000s of committers AND it's a ML that is not moderated, so it allows discussions more easily
FWIW we already have a list that includes all PLs: eclipse.org-project-leadership .
While we've tended to use the cross-project-issues-dev as a 'handy way to reach a large number of projects' , that was mostly a side effect of it being used for SimRel purposes in the past and so included people that were involved in a larger number of projects(even those not on the release train).
I agree that all simrel discusssions should move to the simrel list, and then maybe we just retire cross-projects-issues-dev as it's more than served it's purpose.
FYI,
I've sent a final announcement:
https://www.eclipse.org/lists/cross-project-issues-dev/msg20041.html
And I've changed the documentation:
https://github.com/eclipse-simrel/.github/commit/bb7317ae22f5107c9f641b8496cb6afcd8b15904
