I think we already mostly have this. The separation (remembering something I read off Trac I think,) was something like: * cvs-ghc mailing list: Prospective patches, automatically generated build/commit emails, etc. * glasgow-haskell-users mailing list: Developers and users of GHC discussing issues of design, process, bugs or fielding questions et cetera Doing some counting: looking at my email (which is gmail,) I have the last 100 most recent email *threads* open from cvs-ghc. The 100th dates to Nov 30th. I count about ~7 instances of non-build-or-commit-generated discussions in this timeframe (that is, ~7 email threads where the content wasn't just a build email, but a follow up, or it was actually it's own thread.) Almost all of these instances are related to patches or patches that were committed and some talk happened about them. One (maybe two) were about build/test failures. In contrast, for glasgow-haskell-users, for the past 100 threads: the 100th thread dates to July 12th. However, the structure of all these conversations is far, far more rich: just about every single thread contains far more discussion, almost 100% of them containing at least 2-3 emails. Some go as far as 20-70 emails deep, and many have several handfuls of responses. This is just for the past few months but I've been subscribed to both for years, so I'd say that sounds about right.
From this, I would infer that most of the interesting discussion does, in fact, happen on glasgow-haskell-users. There are perhaps fewer topics at a less regular pace, but it's really here. In contrast, cvs-ghc is mostly autogenerated stuff regular developers etc care about, with the sprinkling of discussion, almost all of it for patches or failures it seems.
The thing is, I would think that most people who are trying to get
into routinely hacking on GHC would want to be subscribed to both
anyway. Personally I think commits are the most valuable asset I can
see at a glance. But Johan has discussed having Jenkins performance
regressions sent out in light of the recent performance Tsar work, and
(some of) the bots do report success nightly here. So for people who
aren't submitting a benign patch or doing one-off-work, you are
probably at least going to want that stuff on your radar. But even
just looking at the work others are doing can give you ideas, or give
you familiarity with something (it's even exciting to read patches
sometimes!)
Overall I think the current separation is actually pretty good. Most
of the real meaty questions are asked here, and the developers
routinely sit on cvs-ghc to talk about patches or build failures and
the like. However, I do agree that sometimes you can miss out on
interesting discussion that happens there. Perhaps the rules could be
changed so that:
* cvs-ghc is only for automatically-generated content like build
emails, regressions, and commits.
* glasgow-haskell-users is for everything else, including patch review
(which also happens on trac) or discussing failures/regressions.
I don't know how attached I am to the current scheme, but perhaps this
sounds better to some, and I thought I could offer .02c having been
listening here for a while. :)
On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 8:31 PM, Carter Schonwald
hey all, It seems to me (and i've certainly heard other people echo this sentiment) that: ghc dev chatting gets buried in the huge volume of commit + build report emails, and that creates (perhaps) another barrier to involvement in ghc dev at the hobbyist (rather than part time/full time ) scale?
So my question for the community (and of course current ghc devs )
1) do others agree that theres value in separating the two?
2) would this just be another use of the ghc-users list or would it be worth having a ghc-dev list?
3) most importantly, would the folks actively involved in ghc dev be willing/able to do so?
That said, it does seem like the majority of the interesting ghc-dev chatter is on Trac issues, which is a good thing, though theres lots of interesting wee nuggets buried on the ghc-cvs list intermittently
I hope this question makes sense for y'all! -Carter
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