I recently did receive a mail asking me not to send so many
announcements to the list. On the one hand I think that this is a
good interjection but on the other hand it collides with the ‘release
often’ commandment.
I did announce the several versions of Periodic.rb not because I did
want to flood the list but because they did significantly change:
0.1 -> 0.2 did mean a transition did add multi-language support
0.2 -> 0.3 was a transition from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8
0.4 -> 0.4 did add support for alternative spellings of element names
Is there some ‘best current practice’ for the frequency of
announcements?
–
Joaquin Navarro-Valls, Holy See Press Office Director on 2003-03-18:
“Whoever decides that all peaceful means that international law has
put at our disposition have been exhausted assumes a serious
responsibility before God, his conscience and history.”
I recently did receive a mail asking me not to send so many
announcements to the list. On the one hand I think that this is a
good interjection but on the other hand it collides with the ‘release
often’ commandment.
Josef,
You are not sending too many announcements to the list. Perhaps the
person who sent you the mail was just feeling constipated and needed to
take it out on someone.
I recently did receive a mail asking me not to send so many
announcements to the list. On the one hand I think that this is a
good interjection but on the other hand it collides with the ‘release
often’ commandment.
Release as often as you like. That’s what the list is for.
It’s not like you are forcing anyone to read every announcement. If
someone doesn’t want to read it, they don’t have to.
BTW, great work on Periodic.rb! Please keep me updated.
···
–
Daniel Carrera
Graduate Teaching Assistant. Math Dept.
University of Maryland. (301) 405-5137
I recently did receive a mail asking me not to send so many
announcements to the list. On the one hand I think that this is a
good interjection but on the other hand it collides with the ‘release
often’ commandment.
Josef,
You are not sending too many announcements to the list. Perhaps the
person who sent you the mail was just feeling constipated and needed to
take it out on someone.
Lyle’s right. Besides, I don’t think anyone
but Matz has enough authority to say that.
Hal
···
----- Original Message -----
From: “Lyle Johnson” lyle@users.sourceforge.net
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: “ruby-talk ML” ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 6:15 PM
Subject: Re: Frequency of announcements
It was me. I was not intending to cause any offence, and it was just a
suggestion made privately, but I will take more roughage if it will help
Release often? - absolutely.
Announce globally every time you release? - I’m not sure, especially in a
phase of heavy development where new releases are thick and fast.
To take an extreme case: if I were to release a package daily, and it’s of
minority interest in relation to the set of people I am announcing to,
should I make a global announcement every time?
I would argue that the first announcement would raise awareness of the
package’s existence, and someone who is using it is likely to be monitoring
it in the RAA (which has a ‘recent changes’ section anyway), and/or its
homepage, and/or a separate mailing list more specifically targetted to its
users.
If you don’t announce every time though, then that leaves an entirely
subjective judgement as to what consistutes a “major release”.
I admit I was being a bit too pre-emptive on this one. But I do notice lots
of updates appearing in RAA which don’t get announced on ruby-talk. Are they
of any less interest? If they were all announced here, wouldn’t it be
tiresome?
Regards,
Brian.
···
On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 09:15:23AM +0900, Lyle Johnson wrote:
Josef,
You are not sending too many announcements to the list. Perhaps the
person who sent you the mail was just feeling constipated and needed to
take it out on someone.
Or you could annouce to rubynet-announce@lists.rubynet.org, which is a
list speciallly crafted for announces and ends up sending digests here
to this list.
I admit I was being a bit too pre-emptive on this one. But I do
notice lots
of updates appearing in RAA which don’t get announced on
ruby-talk. Are they
of any less interest? If they were all announced here, wouldn’t it be
tiresome?
Most mail readers will allow you to sort/move/filter based on text
in the subject. If announcements follow some basic formatting etiquette
(i.e., the subject starts with [ANN]) then filtering is easy.
I tend to check RAA frequently, and even if every new update was
announced here it wouldn’t be overwhelming. I’m more concerned about
apps that are not on RAA and do not get much or any mention here.
I gotta say that I don’t think the announce-only list is proving its
value very well. The digests we get are just repeating something
that’s been announced anyway (in most cases).
But fundamentally, announcements don’t take place in a vaccuum. Most
of the time, someone announces something on -talk, and it then becomes
a subject of discussion. Ergo, announcements belong on -talk.
Gavin
···
On Friday, March 21, 2003, 5:39:13 AM, Eric wrote:
Is there some ‘best current practice’ for the frequency of
announcements?
Prefix the subject with [ANN] so that people can filter/sort/block
messages.
Use your best judgment. If you believe the change is significant, then
announce it.
Or you could annouce to rubynet-announce@lists.rubynet.org, which is a
list speciallly crafted for announces and ends up sending digests here
to this list.
Most mail readers will allow you to sort/move/filter based on text
in the subject. If announcements follow some basic formatting
etiquette (i.e., the subject starts with [ANN]) then filtering is
easy.
In addition to adding ‘[ANN]’ to the subject I send announcement n+1
as an answer to announcement n (with references to all predecessors)
so that the announcemnts are a single thread but I am not sure if
that maps to a thread in comp.lang.ruby as well.
“So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said
unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her.” - John, 8:6
But fundamentally, announcements don’t take place in a vaccuum. Most
of the time, someone announces something on -talk, and it then becomes
a subject of discussion. Ergo, announcements belong on -talk.
Gavin
I’m beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be worth creating a
‘comp.lang.ruby.packages’ (or ‘modules’) newsgroup at some point,
specifically for announcements, RFC’s, problems/questions with RAA
packages, etc.
I’m beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be worth creating a
‘comp.lang.ruby.packages’ (or ‘modules’) newsgroup at some point,
specifically for announcements, RFC’s, problems/questions with RAA
packages, etc.
And yes, I prefer newsgroups to mailing lists.
Nevertheless this ruby discussion forum has a newsgroup/mailing list
duality so comp.lang.ruby.packages would require a) an additional
mailing list to correspond to it or b) a way of making sure that
package information from the mailing list goes to .packages while the
remainder does not.
Besides that I don’t think it is a good idea to move problems with
and questions about RAA packages off of this list. They belong here.
I’d rather suggest ‘comp.lang.ruby.announce’.
